I had just started my master’s degree in artificial intelligence when a classmate asked me if I’d heard of Amazon, a new online bookstore where you could order virtually any book in the world and have it delivered to your door. Feeling all the excitement of a high school book fair wash over me again, I entered the world of Amazon.com and ordered a beautiful book. It felt revolutionary and futuristic, yet cozy and personal. At the end of that year, 1995, Amazon sent its loyal customers, including me, a free cup of coffee for the holidays.
It would have been hard to imagine then that the small company run by Jeff Bezos… Garage in Bellevue, Washington would be celebrating its 30th anniversary and a mind-blowing price of $1.97 billion Current net worth. I still use Amazon to buy gadgets and essentials, watch movies and shows, and read books on a Kindle. I do all this despite knowing that my once-favorite bookstore has become a data-hungry behemoth that is destroying personal privacy.
Today, Amazon sells basically everything and knows basically everything, from our favorite toilet paper to our kids' questions to Alexa to what's happening in our neighborhoods, and it's let police We have a part in that, too! Amazon knows where we live, what our voice sounds like, who our contacts are, what our credit history is like, what temperature we like to keep our homes at, and even if we have allergies or other health issues.
From this information, the company infers a complete profile: it knows if we are gay or straight, married or divorced, Republican or Democrat, sexually active or not, religious or secular. It knows our educational level and how much money we earn. And it uses this data to sell us better.
As a privacy researcher, I advocate for strong consumer privacy protections. After spending nearly a decade scrutinizing privacy policies, I can safely say that Amazon has been worse at privacy than almost any other company. It’s not just that Amazon has horrible privacy policies; it’s also that, along with Facebook and Google, it co-authored our terrible targeted advertising economy, based on extracting as much data from users as possible so that anyone with access to it can manipulate them into buying more stuff.
Considering how important freedom is to America's origin story, it's ironic that the country is so beholden to a company that has turned the manipulation of our free will into a science.
“Did you just buy these Italian coffee beans?” Amazon asks us. “Here’s what you should buy next.”
Privacy and free will are inextricably intertwined: both rely on being allowed to decide who we are, what we want, and when we want it without anyone watching or interfering. Privacy is good for our mental health and for society. Neither corporations nor governments (which have a way of acquiring the data that companies collect) should have access to unlimited knowledge about who we are and what we do all the time.
Amazon has played a key role in making this possible. Its war on privacy took on a particularly sharp turn. dystopian Recently in Britain, some train stations used an Amazon AI system called Rekognition to scan passengers’ faces and determine their age, gender, and emotional state — whether happy, sad, or angry; identify supposedly antisocial behaviors like running, shouting, skateboarding, and smoking; and guess whether they were suicidal. It’s like Orwell’s thought police come to life, but instead of Big Brother, it’s Big Bezos.
The worst part is that we simply accept this intrusion in exchange for cheap stuff and free two-day shipping.
Unfortunately, Amazon has become almost a commodity, but we can take steps to curb its worst consequences.
Consumers should not bear the burden of improving Amazon, but policy makers and regulators. A good starting point is the United States Privacy Rights Actlegislation currently in Congress. It's not perfect, but it would at least address our glaring lack of a federal privacy law. State privacy laws form a patchwork that varies widely in their effectiveness at protecting consumers.
We need to start thinking about data privacy as a human right. The idea that companies have a right to all the data they can collect and deduce about us is crazy. Thirty years ago, no one would have agreed with it.
This is not how the world is supposed to work, and it is especially frightening that we are in this situation as we enter the age of artificial intelligence. Generative AI programs, like the chatbots we hear about all the time, are designed to extract as much personal information as possible, supposedly to make them more effective. And Amazon is Updating your Alexa assistant incorporate generative AI technology.
Nothing I can impulsively buy on Amazon will help me feel better about a future with no privacy, mass surveillance, and pervasive monitoring of our feelings and tendencies. What started as a beautiful book and a free mug has given way to a world where everything I buy, everywhere I go, and, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, every emotion I feel can be tracked and turned into inferences to sell me more stuff or promote dangerous ideologies or advance whatever other purpose corporations or governments deem useful. If it sounds dystopian, that’s because it is.
Jen Caltrider is the project manager for Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project.
