05: Is Amazon Spying on You?

for cool Zone Media. So we've spoken about the awful work conditions in the Amazon warehouses, the company's disregard for health and safety, and we've also looked at how Amazon manages to avoid paying millions of dollars in tax. Now, though, we're going to move on to something different, because, as I've mentioned, each step up the Amazon pyramid of facori, there's a new scandal to be examined. In this episode, we're going to be asking the question, is Amazon spying

on you? We know the government is, we know social media is, we know Google is. But what about Amazon? A company that, in its delusion, prides itself on being the smiley, happy face of the consumer experience. Let's find out. First, let's take a look at Amazon's range of smart speakers. Now, if you don't know what a smart speaker is, consider

yourself lucky, but to explain. The smart speaker, sometimes referred to as a home assistant, is an Internet enabled two ways speaker system that basically replaces getting up and pressing buttons in your home. For example, if you want to search for something online, you can ask the smart speaker to do it. If you don't want to just get up and switch off the light, you can program the smart speaker to do it on your command. Some of the most advanced smart speakers can be programmed to basically

run your whole house for you. Amazon leads the global market when it comes to smart speakers, but the start of they'd sold a hundred million That sold sixteen point five million smart speakers by the fourth quarter of twenty and almost seventy of smart speaker users in the US favor using the Amazon Echo. The Echo is their most popular smart speaker. It's enabled with Alexa. Alexa is basically

the technology that makes Amazon's smart speakers work. Alexa is a virtual assistant cloud technology that is able to learn things as you use it in a more detailed way of speaking, Alexa is a voice activated user interface that you uses a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence. To function. It all sounds very futuristic, but it's here, it's now, lots of people have it now. Personally, I can be a bit of a luddy and I do not understand why anyone would want such a device in

their house. However, as I just said that many many people do, this is helping Alexa learn, yeah, literally learn. The more commands Alexa receives, the more Alexa develops. In fact, Alexa has learned one hundred thousand new skills since the technology was first launched in November. So to sum up, through the Amazon Echo and its utilization of Alexa, Amazon has a reach into hundreds of millions of homes across

the world. So you'd really hope, for the sake of personal autonomy and privacy that they're not listening into your conversations through the smart speakers. Right Well, in t nineteen, it emerged that Amazon employees had been listening to voice recordings captured via the Echo in consumers homes and offices. This wasn't a couple of rogue employees either, No, Amazon literally hired thousands of people to do this. The job was to not only listen to what you're saying, but

to also transcribe and annotate it. They would then feed it back into the software with the aim of apparently helping Alexa better understand voice commands. Of course, this raises extremely serious questions about citizens personal privacy. But it gets even worse. Reported by Forbes, the people tasked with listening to your conversations quote required to record the data, whether the device has been activated on purpose or not end quote.

So basically, they can listen into your conversation even if you don't want them to. So by buying an Amazon Echo, you've essentially invited an employee of Amazon to listen into your private conversations, whether you've given Alexa command or not. If Big Brother is always watching, it's clear now that Amazon is always listening, that is, if you've got one

of these smart speakers in your home. Now, apparently, if the people hired to listen, in record, and annotate conversations in your home via the Amazon Echo here private data such as your bank details, they're told to just mark it down as critical data and move on. Let's hope every single one of the thousands of people Amazon employed to do this honest and didn't steal anyone's details. Now,

according to this Forbes article. One of the darker elements to this situation is that two workers employed to log the conversations thought they heard a sexual assault. When they reported it to their superiors, Amazon ironically enough, told them it's not their job to interfere. So Amazon will listening to your conversations to improve their software data. But if they hear someone being sexually assaulted, they don't want to do anything about it, according to this article. Now, unfortunately

it doesn't stop. They're not at all. Let's talk about Ring. Ring is a home security company owned by Amazon. They bought it in eighteen for one billion dollars and now millions of people across the world used the technology. Ring provides a line of WiFi connected security cameras for your home. You've likely seen footage of Ring doorbell security systems online.

Is basically a little camera in the doorbell or wherever they put it in their house that allows the homeowner to see what's going on outside before they open the door or inside, for example, if they want to keep an eye on their kids as they're plane. Through the wifire, you can have Rings set up on your phone or your tablet or your laptop or wherever it's not a bad idea, but they have been at several problems with Amazon's Ring, so let's start with the hackers. This is

particularly dark. It was reported by journalists Joseph Cox and some month of Cole that hackers had built themselves a dedicated software for hacking into Amazon's Ring security cameras. It becomes clear how funked up this is when looking at a story from Mississippi in the US, where it was discovered that hackers had managed to get into a ring security camera placed in the bedroom of three young girls,

one of them was just eight years old. Hacker managed to take control of the ring security camera, playing music through its speaker as the young girls played in their room. Daker was watching them the whole time. Dakker then played the song Tiptoe through the Tulips, and when one of the young girls asked who was there, the hacker replied, it's Santa, it's your best friend. Here's the actual recording of these hackers interfering with the Ring camera in the

room of these young girls. I'm your best friend. I'm sand a clause. I don't you want to be my best friend? You can mess up your room, you can break your TV. You can do whatever you want. In another incident of the same year, a hacker took control of a RING security camera in Florida and began screaming racist comments at a family for up to three minutes before they were forced to pull the batteries out of

the Ring unit. So why was this happening, Well, essentially, Amazon's Ring wasn't requiring its users to choose two step verification by default. With something as delicate as in home security cameras, this should have been a standard requirement for all users, because without the two steps, it was a lot easier for hackers to get into their system. In fact, reporters Joseph Cox and Samantha Cole found that hackers were building and sharing programs to access RING cameras on criminal forums.

This of course sets a very dark precedent. If that wasn't bad enough, though, it was later discovered that Ring's own employees had been improperly accessing Ring users video data. Amazon's Ring employees were spying on customers themselves. It was discovered that four of Amazon's Ring employees had been fired after abusing their position. They had watched footage from Ring

security cameras without the customer's knowledge or permission. This all came out when Amazon Device President of Public Policy Brian Huesman answered U S Senators in a letter after they had written to Amazon expressing safety concerns about RING devices in November twenty nineteen. In the response letter from Amazon obtained by Motherboard, the question and answer is as follows quote question to your knowledge have there been any documented

instances of this access being abused? Answer? Over the last four years, RING has received four complaints or inquiries regarding a team member's access to RING video data. Although each of the individuals involved in these incidents was authorized to view video data, the attempted access to that data exceeded

what was necessary for their job functions. In each instance, one Ring was made aware of the alleged conduct, RING promptly investigated the incident, and, after determining that the individual violated company policy, terminated the individual. In addition to taking swift action to investigate and take appropriate disciplinary action in each of these cases, RING has taken multiple actions to limit such data access to a smaller number of team members.

RING periodically reviews the access privileges it grants to its team members to verify that they have a continued need for access to customer information for the purpose of maintaining and improving the customer experience end quote. So effectively, Yes, Amazon has found several cases of Ring employees literally spying on their customers. Now you might say, oh, well, this is only four employees. Well, I would argue that this

is only four employees that got caught. Amazon's Ring has clearly been sloppy with its security see both externally and internally reported by The intercept In. Sources inside Ring said that they had provided their research and development team in Ukraine unfettered access to quote a folder on Amazon's S three cloud storage service that contained every video created by

every Ring camera around the world end quote. Not only this, at the time, the video files were left unencrypted, anyone from the team could download someone's sensitive security camera footage

with the click of a button. The source also said, quote Ring unnecessarily provided executives and engineers in the US with highly privileged access to the company's technical support video portal, allowing unfiltered, round the clock live feeds from some customer cameras, regardless of whether they needed access to this extremely sensitive data to do their jobs. End quote. Imagine that people are Amazon's Ring company able to look into your home at seven on a live feed whenever they want to.

That sounds like spying to me, even if there's no intention of doing anything bad behind that they shouldn't have had the access. Now. Whilst Ring pointed out to US senators that for employees in Ukraine had been caught and fired for spying on customers, it seems, at least according to the source, that they failed to mention how these employees were able to do so. That is rings sloppy internal security when it comes to allowing workers access to

Ring security video. So there's the issues with Amazon's Echo smart speakers and the issues with Amazon's Ring home security devices. After all that it might allow you to discover the Amazon is now making little robots for your house, they too, have already raised serious privacy concerns. Astro join me on stage today. I'm full to introduce you to a new kind of household robot that integrates Alexa advanced hardware, software,

computer vision, and AI in a brand new way. And it's a beautiful illustration of how ambient computing can improve customers lives in a way that traditional consumer electronics just kept if you didn't know. Amazon's Astro is a new three wheeled little robot that can autonomously drive around your home. Is packed with cameras and has a little screen on the front with two eyes. It's meant to be cute,

but honestly, it looks a little bit creepy. The idea behind Astro is that it will map the layout of your home and act as a little robot butler, so long as everything in your house is hooked up to the same system as Astros Amazon's. Is this about Astro quote? Astro is a household robot for home monitoring with Alexa. When you're away, use the Astro app to see a live view of your home, check in on specific rooms

and viewpoints, and get activity alerts. When you're home, Astro can follow you from room to room, playing your favorite music, podcasts or shows, and find you to deliver calls, reminders, alarms, and timers set with Alexa. End quote. Honestly, it sounds fucking horrible, but that's Astro. So. Astro is known internally at Amazon as Vesta and Astro Slash. Vesta has another purpose that they don't tell you about in that advert. Running surveillance on customers. Have a listen to this internal

training video for Astro slash VESTA. Don't ask us where we got this, just have a listen to what they're saying the donation. Start following that Anne stranger and keep following under the stranger goes out of the field of you. As soon as the person goes out of field of you, it will start investigation. That is, it will go and check in each scampaigns that is created. This investigation. Unknown investigation or non person investigation will happen only after reaching

to the first scanpoint. This will not happen immediately. And regarding the non person investigation, the patrol should start as soon as it sees the non person in the field of you, and immediately second later the person leaves from the field of you, the patrol will start automatically. I mean, when the investor is following an unknown person, then a non person is introduced into the field of you, the

patrol or investigation immediately stops. You know, that was a little bit hard to understand due to the start, but that's we got it. But basically she is explaining how Astro can run an investigation patrol. If a stranger quote, stranger is in the house, and then Astro can hide that activity from the non users at will if they enter astros field of vision. So basically running about the house doing a little investigation on this stranger. Then the

owner walks interview and quickly Astro stops it. I don't know about you, but along with several other aspects of Astro that will hear about, that seems quite creepy to me. To get a better understanding of what Amazon is up to with their Astro robot, I spoke to Matthew Goalt. He's a staff reporter at Motherboard and the host of their cyber podcast. He's also the one that first found

out about the surveillance situation with Astro. So the pitch for investor or Astro as it's known now is that it's basically like a tablet on wheels with Alexa software built in and for a customer gets a cute little Wally style thing the roll around your house, let you buy stuff on Amazon, and it integrates into the rest of the Amazon ecosystem into your home, meaning it can communicate with ring cameras. Uh, you know, your Echo, your Alexa and and if you have one an Amazon powered

security system. So the pitch and the way it's described internally or kind of two different things. Um, the marketing says, a clever little robot that learns from you and will

help you in your day to day life. So the internal documentation kind of shows that Astro is a robot that's designed to slowly move through your home, learn all of its nooks and crannies, monitor to the behavior of its inhabitants, and it literally will follow people around the house, recording what they say and do and attempting to integrate that data into a customer profile of the home. It also has facial recognition software that the people working on

the device said doesn't work very well. So when you buy this thing, you're supposed to get everyone in the family together, you hunker down in front of it, and you register your face. Um. This is one of the things that Astro does is perk up when it meets someone in the home who isn't supposed to be there. So if you know, ostensibly if you have an intruder, it will follow them around, record what they're saying and doing stot you know, for someone to view later, and

if certain conditions are met, alert the authorities. What those conditions are aren't exactly clear, but the the the idea is that if they are stealing something or making certain kinds of loud noise like say the shattering of glass, or if or if Astro sees a fire set, it will then contact the relevant authorities. Now, I know you might be thinking at this stage, well, that doesn't sound that bad. Yeah, it's mapping out my whole house, reading

people's faces, etcetera. But if somebody bursts into my house and I'm not there, this little robot thing is going to call the police. Well, listen on, because it's not that simple. And at the end of this you can decide if you think the negatives outweigh the positives. But the people we talked to who had worked on this thing where we're not happy with the device, Um, we talked to several people. Every single one of them kind of said the same thing that they thought that this

was terrible. They were horrified by the privacy implications of it, and that generally just didn't work very well. Astro seems kind of bad at everything that it does. Um, this is one of my favorite quotes. Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity, and will note that every single person we talked to mentioned that stairs were a problem

for Astro does not know how to handle them. Quote the person detection is unreliable at best, making the in home security proposition laughable. So drilling down, how does Astro collect data on its customers? So, Astro is another in a long line of data gathering operations run by Amazon. Basically, every interaction anyone has with Amazon, whether through using an Echo Dot to order cheese Whiz or rewatching X files for the five time on Prime Video, that becomes a

data point and Amazon's like huge aws stores. Um So, if you're read a book on good Reads, or you highlight a passage in a Game of Thrones novel on your kindle, or you leave a one star review for dish soap on Amazon, the site learns all of that. Ostensibly, it uses this data to better manage the customer experience. You might start seeing books similar to the one you rated highly, start getting ads for something that was mentioned

in that passage that you highlighted. Uh, and you'll probably never see dish soap that you rated at one star ever again, Um, and a lot of people love this. They love the way that interacting with Amazon and its systems allows you know, the site to learn about you as a customer. The argument is that it makes life easier, and that's kind of the tradeoff, right, You're sacrificing a

little bit of privacy for convenience. But the thing is, I think a lot of what Amazon does, and a lot of other people think that what Amazon does h rises to the level of spying. And I think Astro is a really good way to kind of taught, like have that conversation. Um, there's stuff that it does that

just massive, massive, massive privacy concerns. And so if you think about Astro as like a camera and a recorder on wheels that is feeding information back to Amazon, Well, who is looking at that information and why are they looking at that information? Is there any kind of precedent set in Amazon as a company that can tell us about how they're going to use that information going forward?

At this point in the episode, because of what we spoke about earlier, we know that there is a precedent and that the people that get hold of this information Amazon continuously disrespecting people's privacy is likely that the same thing will happen with Astro um. And this is really important because I think there's this big misunderstanding of Amazon.

When we start talking about its power and about breaking it up and about whether or not it's some monopoly, people are just like, well, it's just a website that sells stuff that's really not true anymore. It also sells a lot of surveillance tech, you know, like this little astro robot. It's runs aws. It's the biggest data form

on the planet. UM. A lot of the Internet is now filtered or stored on their cloud servers, and that's a huge single point of failure in Amazon is storing a lot of audio and video fed to it by its customers through the cameras and echo dots and little

astros that are it's selling. If that wasn't bad enough, listen to this extra detail a few Goats tells us about the ring Comeras we spoke about the stuff of the episode, Amazon has a lot of deals with various law enforcement agencies across the country that gives them carte blanche access to these ring cameras. Um. There's really good investigations in pieces in Motherboard and then also from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that have shown that Amazon routinely gives

cops access to these things. Um. One example, in San Francisco in twenty nineteen, cops were given access to ring camera footage so they could watch protests. And this is not something that they go and they check with Hey, can we uh, can we use your ring camera? See what the footage is like. No, Amazon just hands it over. UM. So you're when you're installing one of these things in your home, you're becoming part of a vast surveillance network

and you don't have any control over where that data goes. Uh. There's a town in California that partnered with RING to give away free cameras to anyone who witnessed a neighbor committing a crime and then promised to testify against them in court, you know, incentivizing people to rat out their neighbors. In an incident in Washington State, a RING user posted footage of someone on their porch. Sheriff later tracked down the guy and then they got into a confrontation they

killed him. The woman has said repeatedly after the fact that she regrets posting the footage online, and she feels that her her sharing the ring recording directly led to the man's death. UM. And it's one of these things where it was obviously a guy that was in distress and in need of like a mental health check um. And he died because of an interaction with the police and because someone saw him on a ring camera. Now, Amazon can't always control who gets access, and it can't

protect you from its own employees. UM. Their devices for spine, even if ostensibly they're supposed to be used to make our lives more convenient and keep people safe. And at the end of the day, it's a camera or recorder and you don't have control over what's done with the data once it hits Amazon servers. It's one thing to have like a closed circuit television system set up in your home where you are the only one that has

access to the footage. But when you get integrated into Amazon's services like this, you're you're you're inviting this huge company to paw through all of your stuff and look through it all. And you know, here we have Astro, this little device that that moves around your house and records even more information. So Amazon has been caught spying on its customers several times. How is the spying via Astro unique? I would say the spying the astro is

unique because it's ambulatory. This thing moves around your house. It has your faces, It has the faces of you and everyone in your home stored in side of it, and it's making judgment calls about who should and shouldn't be there. And the people who have worked on this

thing tell us it's not good at making those judgment calls. UM. The facial recognition software is built on shaky foundation UM, and trying to integrate into a thousand dollar a little robot that's going to move around your house is asking for a disaster. UM. You know, it's one thing to have the ring camera pointed outside your front door, or

an Alexa that listens to everything inside your home. It's quite another to have a little device that moves around, recording audio and video and creating a floor plan in its memory. So this is another one of the really interesting unique features UM of Astro that has kind of talked about more in the design documents than it is in the marketing. UM. It learns your floor plan, it moves around your home, It finds all the nukes and crannies.

It's builds a rendering of your house in its memory. Uh. It also monitors the foot traffic of everyone in the house and learns what the hotspots are. According to the design documents we looked at, astro nos say that at three fifteen, the kids get home from school and the entrance to the house becomes a traffic hot spot, so it knows that it should avoid that. Um, it's monitoring, it's moving around the house except when it's charging, recording audio and video. Um, it's moving around on its own

and making explicit maps of your residence. And we already know that hackers have been able to get access to Amazon servers before. Just like this is all a recipe for disaster, recipe for disaster. So after all that, it's up to you to decide. Is Amazon spying on us? Personally?

I think yes, but your thoughts are yours. The Looking through all of this, though, it feels to me that Amazon is basically tricking us, consciously or unconsciously into consuming more and more trendy gadgets that actually all up as surveillance systems. Access is given to the police at the drop of a hat without your permission. Access has been stolen quite easily by hackers, and access has been given

willingly to employees working at Amazon's tech security divisions. If you're using these products, all of the data, video, images, and voice recordings that they collect all stored in Amazon's Big Cloud. Up they hearing all of this, does that make you feel safe? In the next episode of Megacorp, will be looking into Amazon's connections to intelligence agencies across the world, including the CIA and m I six. Megacorp is made by my production company H eleven for Cool

Zone Media. It's written, researched, and produced by myself, Jake Hanrahan. It was also produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music is by Some Black, graphics by Adam Doyle and sound engineering by Splicing Block. If you want to get in touch, follow me on social media at Jake Underscore Hanrahan. That's h A N A h A N