The Amazon Privacy Nightmare
“What you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa and who’s at your front door” — it’s all accessible.
Next to the U.S. military, the most trusted institution in America is Amazon. According to a Harvard/Harris Poll done in June 2021, 71% of the public has a favorable or very favorable view of the giant company, ahead of the police, the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI and the Supreme Court. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, given how focused Amazon is on being “the world’s most customer-centric company.”
Well, maybe it’s time we thought again about how much to trust it. According to a new investigative report by Reveal News and WIRED magazine, the gigantic company has long-standing problems controlling access to customer information. “What you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa and who’s at your front door” — all of that data has become “so sprawling, fragmented and promiscuously shared within the company that [its own] security division [can’t] even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders.”
It’s another privacy nightmare. Reveal and WIRED report that data privileges inside Amazon have been so loose low-level…
