Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Employee Groups | Hacker News Reader

Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Employee Groups

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70 pointsbrown9-214 comments

Of the big five, Amazon was by far the easiest to give up. Unless you're super embedded in the Alexa ecosystem, you're giving up... what, the bottom-of-the-barrel streaming services and some minor convenience/savings when it comes to online shopping?

All but the most specialized products on Amazon can be found elsewhere. You'll pay a few extra dollars for shipping and it might take a couple extra days to arrive. That's about it. As a silver lining, you'll probably get to use a slightly-less-terrible web interface. And frankly, if you're habitually making full use of Prime, you may want to re-evaluate your shopping habits anyway.

I understand why Google and Apple and Microsoft are able to get away with what they do. It's hard to ditch one and practically impossible to ditch all three. But Amazon? I just don't get it at all.

I would disagree here. You’d have to give up their subsidiaries as well: Whole Foods, Twitch, IMDb, ring, Audible, and even AWS. As well as several online large scale shops (many even based through Shopify) use Amazon’s delivery network for faster shipping.

Google and MSFT provide cloud services also but AWS for sure has a large grasp on the market. Whole Foods is fairly unique; you can give it up but I doubt most people will. Audible and Kindle definitely are at the top of the pack for what they do, and Twitch is unrivaled. In Hollywood IMDb is the fairly standard. Ring can be replaced with Nest but you’re just going from one large company to another.

Giving up just amazon’s retail platform is part of it but it’s just a piece of a larger conglomerate.

Out of the bunch you described I’d actually argue Apple is the simplest to give up since it’s a select few high end technology pieces, rather than several large footholds in several niches.

I did forget about AWS, which IMO is the one Amazon product that's arguably essential under certain circumstances. But those are usually in the context of an employer, and I generally draw a line between work-use and personal-use. For example, I use no Google products personally but I do have to use them at work.

As far as subsidiaries, that's more nuanced, though I do avoid Whole Foods and don't find myself using the others very often. If you're in Texas, Central Market is a perfect alternative to Whole Foods. I have Arlo cameras instead of Ring, which is owned by Netgear (not that home cameras are exactly essential). You're right that IMDB and Twitch don't have great alternatives, though you can get a lot out of both of those without spending any money. I didn't realize they let other companies use their shipping network, which is a more complicated case.

Still, even just foregoing the name-brand services sends a signal. And anyway, most of their really egregious practices are around their warehouses (and in turn, the core Amazon retail site).

I completely agree, but even easier for me to give them up because I don’t have access to any of the “perks” in my area. So I’m paying full price for my membership but I don’t have most of the services.

Easiest call I made. I was barely using Prime, and there are plenty of other places to buy stuff online.

> As a silver lining, you'll probably get to use a slightly-less-terrible web interface.

I can’t find anything on that god-awful website, and it must be by design, I guess they want me to give up and buy whatever is in front of me, but I refuse, it’s just too easy to open another tab and find whatever Amazon is trying to flog, cheaper elsewhere and at least here in the UK, next day delivery is becoming standard.

If you sort price low to high you literally lose like 30-75% of the results. And you can't choose "Sold by Amazon" until you choose a category. Their search is prehistorically bad.

Oh, and I worked for AWS back 2015ish. Employees get treated like dirt. Terrible middle managers get promoted through backstabbing. Tea bag amenities and wooden door desks ('cuz nostalgia - screw posture!) Having to fight to get any ergonomics. Offices without windows. Gross place. Fk Amazon with a passion.

“Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements.”

From another Motherboard writer:

https://twitter.com/bigblackjacobin/status/13309270540832645...

“Amazon's Global Security Operations seems to surveil literally any environmental activism, labor organizing, or social movement in Europe. One notable instance: they hired Pinkertons to infilitrate a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland and spy on workers and managers.”

——

As corporations grow in power, we have to worry about them surveilling, not just government surveillance — governments in democracies have oversight, privacy can be invaded by corporations with less oversight.

A bunch of interesting tidbits in the article.

From the thread:

> In a report from November 2019, however, an analyst wrote that Amazon hired Pinkerton spies who were "inserted" into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that management coached job candidates on how to complete job interviews and possibly even conducted the process for them.

The Pinkerton spies were posted in a Wroclaw warehouse, known as WRO1, operated by the Amazon contractor ADECCO to investigate the allegation, according to the Amazon report. "PINKERTON operatives were inserted into WRO1 ADECCO between 2019-11-19 and 2019-11-21. No identifiable evidence of coaching on behalf of the agency recruiters was observed," the document states. "Investigative actions to prove/disprove this hypothesis are ongoing."

While some of Amazon's other activities listed here are concerning or worse, I can't see anything surprising or improper about the actual Pinkerton episode.

It strikes me as weird that Pinkerton never changed its name. Their name seems to mostly be used either to accuse people of being like them or as shorthand for "evil corporate/government henchmen" in historical works. Merely talking to them is going to anger an employee base. Why wouldn't they just change it to something more innocuous like "Allen's Neighborhood Union Breaking Thugs" or "Academi?"

Maybe iHeartCorporate?

Good question. Maybe you only bring them in when you want to play hardball so you don't care what people think. You want them afraid.

Remember how ignorant the average American is when it comes to current events, then realize that they're an order of magnitude more ignorant when it comes to history.

Sure, but they're stock character movie and video game villains. They're in Zorro. They're in Red Dead Redemption. They're in Bioshock. They're in Boardwalk Empire. They're always violent goons, sneaky goons, or violent, sneaky goons.

I think maybe the answer is that their name recognition is mud with employees, but that's a selling point to management. Do you really want to try to form a union when you know your company is employing Pinkertons? After all, you remember how scary those guys were in (insert Western movie).

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