A collection of leaked internal documents has shown how a former adviser to US President Joe Biden assisted Amazon in avoiding national privacy laws.
According to documents acquired by Reuters, Jay Carney, who worked as Vice President Biden’s communications director and then as press secretary for the Obama White House, is the man directing a statewide lobbying push to destroy new privacy laws in 25 states.
Internal memos openly state Carney’s aim to “alter or obstruct US and EU regulation/legislation that might hamper development for Alexa-powered devices,” and praise his division’s triumphs in neutralizing new regulations so that they have “little if any” influence on the company’s activities.
According to Reuters, Amazon has “killed or damaged” privacy safeguards in more than 36 bills.
Carney’s lobbying operation is claimed to have grown from a few dozen personnel to more than 250 after being hired by Amazon in 2015 and is laser-focused on enabling the corporation to continue mining customer data through its Alexa devices, among other things.
Amazon communications executive Drew Herdener sought to assist Carney set the tone for his new aggressive new style in a leaked 2015 draft document published by Reuters, stating that they wanted “policymakers and journalists to fear us.”
According to the final version of the message, “journalists and policymakers don’t take the good that Amazon does for granted when they talk publicly about us and make choices impacting our company or reputation.”
Consumers in California have the right to ask tech businesses what information they have on file about them.
One Reuters reporter learned as part of their inquiry that Amazon had made 90,000 recordings of them and their family since 2017.
Another reporter discovered comprehensive information on their Kindle reading habits as well as a profile of their family’s “implicit eating preferences” on the company’s servers.
According to reports, one of the reasons such big data-gathering activities continue is due in part to Amazon’s formidable lobbying arm, which is led by Carney and his staff.
“The basis of this article is inaccurate, and contains reporting that relies on early, incomplete drafts of documents to draw false conclusions,” an Amazon spokeswoman told Reuters.
“We recognize we must get privacy right in order to satisfy our customers’ high expectations,” said the spokesman, adding that it tries to preserve consumers’ privacy and emphasizes that it does not sell any of their data.
