[ad_1]
From what you shop online, to how you remember tasks, to controlling your front door, Amazon seems to be everywhere.
And it looks like the company doesn’t want to end its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars on two massive acquisitions that, if approved, will expand its growing presence in consumers’ lives.
See: Amazon’s agreement with a medical company raises the risk of patient privacy
At this time, the company is targeting two sectors: health care, through it 3.9 billion dollars were purchased Primary care company OneMedical and “smart home” company Irobot, maker of the popular robot vacuum, plans to expand its $1.7 billion merger.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer data, both mergers have raised lingering privacy concerns about how Amazon collects data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employs sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.
“Rumba is getting this vast collection of data about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for an antitrust group that opposes local autonomy. “The clear objective, with all the other products it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) with privacy issues come antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.
Amazon’s reach goes beyond that. According to some estimates, the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market, allowing it to gather comprehensive information about the purchasing choices of millions of Americans and others around the world. Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which feature voice assistant Alexa, dominate the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
Ring, which Amazon bought for $1 billion in 2018, tracks door entries and helps police track crime — even when users don’t know it. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, raising concerns about data breaches that Amazon has tried to help.
Read more: Amazon gave the doorbell to the police without the user’s consent
“We treat your palm signature like any other highly sensitive personal information and put the highest level of technical and physical security controls in place,” the company said on a website detailing the technology.
Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon still have little say in how their employers manage their computer networks, which Amazon — along with Google — has long dominated with cloud-computing service AWS.
“It’s hard to think of another company that has as many touch points as Amazon does for an individual,” said Ian Greenblatt, who heads technology research at JD Power’s consumer research firm. “It’s very difficult, and it’s hard to put a finger on it.”
And Amazon — like any company — aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has bought Wi-Fi startup Ero and partnered with construction firm Lennar to offer tech-enabled homes. With iRobot, it gets one more building block for the ultimate smart home — and, of course, more data.
According to the vacuum maker, customers can opt out of having the robotic devices set up around their home. But data privacy advocates worry that the merger is another way Amazon could use it to integrate data into its other devices or target consumers with ads.
Read more: Amazon offers EU discounts to avoid antitrust issues
In a statement, Amazon spokeswoman Lisa Levandowski denied that this is what the company wants to do.
“We do not use Home Maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so,” Lewandowski said.
Whether that allays concerns is another matter, especially in light of research on Amazon’s other devices. Earlier this year, a team of university researchers reported that voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices could be used to target ads to consumers – a claim the company has previously denied.
Umar Iqbal, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington who led the study, said he and his colleagues use Echo devices that run third-party skills like Alexa apps that communicate with advertisers.
Levandowski said consumers can opt out of receiving “interest-based” ads by adjusting their preferences on Amazon’s ad preferences page. She also said Amazon does not share Alexa requests with ad networks.
Skills that collect personal information are required to post their privacy policy on the listing page in the Amazon store, the company said. But researchers say only 2% are transparent about their data collection practices, and most don’t mention Alexa or Amazon at all.
For companies like Amazon, data collection isn’t just for information, said Christine Martin, professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.
“You can see them trying to paint a bigger picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about you, especially about what you can draw, and then you compare it to other people.”
For example, Amazon’s One Medical deal has raised questions about how the company handles personal health information that falls under its purview.
If the deal closes, Levandowski said customers’ health data will be handled separately from Amazon’s other businesses. She also added that Amazon cannot use personal health information to advertise or market Amazon products and services to others without express consent from the customer.
But Lucia Savage, chief privacy officer at critical care provider Omada Health, said that doesn’t mean a medic can’t get data from Amazon’s other business arms, which could help better inform its patients. Information has to flow one way, she said.
Of course, privacy concerns aren’t limited to Amazon. For example, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Google, under pressure from Democratic lawmakers, said it would immediately destroy information about users who visit abortion clinics. Meanwhile, Facebook owner Meta was sued in February for using “cookies” that tracked users after they left Facebook a decade ago.
But if like Meta and Google they’re primarily focused on selling ads, Amazon could benefit more from collecting data because its primary purpose is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the Economic Security Project, an antitrust group.
“For them, the information is to get you to buy more and get them locked into their stuff,” Harman said.
[ad_2]
Source link
