Why Is Amazon Watching Us?
What kind of company is Amazon? It’s a question with a lot of reasonable answers: It’s a peerless e-commerce giant; it’s a massive shipping and logistics operation; it’s a devices and digital-services company that sells millions of gadgets; it’s a cloud provider so widely used that a regional outage can take out a good chunk of the entire internet. With the help of Whole Foods, it’s become a credible competitor in groceries, and with Prime Video, a major streamer and producer of TV and movies. In the course of becoming America’s quintessential neo-conglomerate, though, Amazon has also become something else: a serious — and diverse — surveillance firm.
Two pieces of news from this month help map the depth and scope of Amazon’s investment in surveillance technology. This week, following smartglasses and headset updates from Meta and Apple, Amazon previewed a new pair of glasses that it says will add to its “system of technology to support [delivery] drivers.” The pitch:
Designed specifically for [Delivery Associates], these glasses help them scan packages, follow turn-by-turn walking directions, and capture proof of delivery—all without the use of their phone. The glasses create a hands-free experience, reducing the need to look between the phone, the package, and the surrounding area.
The company emphasizes potential safety benefits for delivery workers, whose jobs are already substantially dictated (and tracked by) mobile apps with a lot of the same functionality. Amazon also says it’s “leveraging the latest advancements in AI to create an end-to-end system” that runs from “inside our delivery stations, to over the road, to the last hundred yards to a customer’s doorstep.” Then it shifts to the future tense, imagining future versions of the glasses that might detect various hazards or, perhaps, “help notify drivers if they’ve mistakenly dropped a package at a customer doorstep that does not correspond with the house or apartment number on the package.”
For workers as for the packages they help deliver, Amazon’s “end-to-end” system is already nearly complete, as documented in more than a decade of reporting: In warehouses, products and people are tracked extensively and precisely in ways that improve throughput by, in part, applying metrics-driven pressure to employees, measuring not evidence of productivity but “time off task.” In delivery vehicles, drivers are surveilled and measured in numerous different dimensions by default, with technology that was also marketed, at launch, with a lot of language about driver safety:
In various nearby industries, Amazon is regarded as a leader in employee surveillance and “algorithmic management” and is likewise held up as an example of its possible effects on workers (more productive, less content, and less likely to organize). In a brief rendering demonstrating how its delivery glasses will work, Amazon shows how worker surveillance will soon extend outside of the vehicle, right up to the doorstep. Which brings us to the second bit of news, from TechCrunch:
Amazon’s surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement.
Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with “evidence collection and investigative work.”
Ring cameras are an underrated Amazon success story: With an appealing pitch — see who or what is on your doorstep, even if you’re not home — the company sold millions of units and constructed a massive surveillance network with numerous benefits for the company itself. They’re a way to counteract package theft and to make it easier for customers to receive deliveries.
They also provide an additional way for the company and its customers to surveil its workers, meaning that Amazon’s glasses aren’t just extending its “end-to-end” delivery apparatus — they’re closing the loop in its employee-monitoring ecosystem. Ring cameras were, for obvious reasons, always interesting to law-enforcement agencies, with which Amazon has had a generally cooperative but heavily scrutinized and limited relationship, at least until recently. Now, by partnering with companies like Axon and Flock, which operate nationwide fleets of license-plate scanners and work with local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies, including ICE, the company is making its surveillance network widely and comprehensively available to the state.
Like most of Amazon’s internal surveillance systems, there’s a clear managerial logic at work in Ring’s expansion, and it shares a lot of DNA with the company’s internal monitoring tools. From the perspective of a large organization, more surveillance is always tempting: It means more control, more data, more chances for optimization, and more security. (Of course, all of that comes at the cost of the privacy, which the people within those systems might not appreciate.)
In Ring’s case, customers largely saw themselves as on the same side as Amazon in a fight against porch piracy and for convenience, if they thought of their purchase in such terms at all. The privacy-based case against buying a Ring camera wasn’t terribly persuasive from the perspective of potential customers, because they were the ones doing the surveillance, from their property, protecting their stuff and homes. Ring cameras invited users to adopt an Amazonian logic of their own, in which total stoop awareness is, clearly, a good and desirable thing.
Barely a decade after Ring’s doorbell-camera pitch first aired on Shark Tank, though, Amazon and millions of its customers have haphazardly and perhaps not entirely consciously teamed up to build something strange, unprecedented, and very Amazon: a crowd-sourced, nationwide, neighborhood surveillance network to which the government now has a set of keys.