I had just started my master’s degree in artificial intelligence when a classmate asked me if I had 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 college book fair come back, I entered the world of Amazon.com and ordered a beautiful book. It seemed revolutionary and futuristic, but still warm and personal. At the end of that year, 1995, Amazon sent its loyal customers, including me, a free holiday coffee mug.
It would have been hard to imagine at the time that the small company, famous for being led by Jeff Bezos, Bellevue, Washington Garage would be celebrating its 30th anniversary and a mind-blowing price of $1.97 thousand billion net worth today. I still use Amazon to order gadgets and necessities, watch movies and shows, and read books on a Kindle. I do all this despite knowing that the once-beloved bookseller has become a data-hungry, privacy-destroying behemoth.
Today, Amazon sells virtually everything and knows virtually everything, from our favorite toilet paper to our kids’ questions to Alexa to what’s going on in our neighborhoods. police Amazon knows where we live, what our voice sounds like, who our contacts are, what our credit history is, what temperature we like to keep our homes at, and even if we have allergies or other health problems.
From this information, the company builds a complete profile: it potentially knows whether we are gay or straight, married or divorced, Republican or Democrat, sexually active or not, religious or secular. It knows our education level and how much money we earn. And it uses this data to better sell us its products.
As a privacy researcher, I advocate for stronger consumer privacy protections. After spending the better part of a decade combing through privacy policies, I can safely say that Amazon is the worst company when it comes to privacy. It’s not just that Amazon has terrible privacy policies; it’s also that, along with Facebook and Google, it co-created our terrible targeted advertising economy, built on siphoning off as much data as possible from users so that anyone with access to it can manipulate them into buying more stuff.
Considering the importance of liberty in America’s early history, it’s ironic that the country is so indebted to a company that has made a science out of manipulating our free will.
“Did you just buy these Italian coffee beans?” Amazon asks. “Here’s what you should buy next.”
Privacy and free will are inextricably linked: both rely on the fact that we can decide who we are, what we want, and when we want it, without anyone observing or interfering. Privacy is good for our mental health and for society. Neither companies nor governments, which have a way of acquiring the data they collect, should have access to unlimited knowledge about who we are and what we do at any given moment.
Amazon has played a key role in making this possible. Its war on privacy has taken a particularly 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 they were happy, sad, or angry; identify supposedly antisocial behaviors like running, screaming, 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 accepted this intrusion in exchange for cheap products and free two-day shipping.
Unfortunately, Amazon has become almost a basic necessity. But we can take steps to limit its worst consequences.
Consumers should not bear the burden of improving Amazon; policymakers and regulators should. A good place for them to start is by American Privacy Rights Acta bill currently before Congress. It’s not perfect, but it would at least address the glaring absence of a federal privacy law. State privacy laws are a patchwork that vary widely in the protection they offer consumers.
We need to start thinking about data privacy as a human right. The idea that companies have the right to have all the data they can collect and infer about us is completely crazy. Thirty years ago, no one would have agreed with this idea.
This is not how the world should work, and it’s especially terrifying that we’re here 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 efficient. And Amazon is upgrade your Alexa assistant to integrate generative AI technology.
Nothing I could buy on Amazon would make me feel better about a future without privacy, mass surveillance, and the omnipresent control of our feelings and tendencies. What started as a beautiful book and a free mug has spawned a world where everything I buy, everywhere I go, and, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, every emotion I feel can be tracked and turned into inferences to sell me more stuff or promote dangerous ideologies or advance any other agenda that corporations or governments deem useful. If this sounds dystopian, it’s because it is.
Jen Caltrider is the lead of Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project.
