Amazon deflects such criticisms by instead pointing to Rekognition’s allegedly “positive” uses, such as finding lost children. The selective highlighting of an invasive technology’s “social good” is an old, established strategy, just as states seek to negatively frame privacy-protecting technologies that limit state power. For example, public-key encryption protocols have been regularly critiqued by governments for fears that it could empower pedophiles, drug-dealers, or terrorists. Instead, governments advocate flawed encryption platforms for which they hold “backdoor keys,” that they proclaim will only be used when absolutely necessary (e.g., with a court-signed warrant). The problem with these arguments is that backdoored encryption is known to be flawed and will be avoided by those seeking to avoid state surveillance. Robust, well-functioning encryption empowers people against state power. But, Rekognition and other facial recognition tools give a clear political advantage to states, and suppress free expression and existence in public.
Ring is a technology that integrates a doorbell with a microphone and video camera, allowing homeowners to view their front doors and be alerted—even from afar—when someone rings the doorbell. It can be activated upon ringing and detect motion; upon activation, the camera footage is recorded to Amazon’s cloud, as well as sent to individuals’ smartphones. Problematically, Ring can stoke or enhance homeowners’ paranoia about safety and security, thus provoking the purchase of more Amazon cameras. Many people pass by or approach front doors on a daily basis—to deliver mail or packages, visit residents, drop off fliers, or ask for directions. Additionally, people soliciting donations or selling products come to front doors, often (but not always) ringing doorbells. Most homeowners are unaware of how often this occurs and Ring can generate suspicions that all the above individuals could be potential criminals seeking to break in, assault, or rob those in the house. Owners can use Ring’s “neighborhood watch” app to post messages about “suspicious” people they witness on their Ring cameras. Disproportionately, Ring owners post such messages about people of color, upon whom racist stereotypes are focused. As Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff put their mission: to “declare war” on “dirtbag criminals.”38
Because Ring generates fears related to crime, police are drawn to this technology, too. Amazon has partnered with over 400 local law enforcement agencies in the U.S.39 Police can use their Amazon-provided portals to see maps of neighborhood Ring users and request video footage from homeowners. Some of these Ring cameras also capture activity taking place in public space, not just an owner’s private property. Consequently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls Ring a “perfect storm of privacy threats.”40 It helps to create a wider surveillance network for police, controlled by paranoid (and biased) homeowners, with infrastructure owned by Amazon. If homeowners cannot be convinced by police—who are trained to strategically apply such pressure—to hand over their Ring’s camera footage, police can simply subpoena Amazon directly for footage.
A hegemonic threat to privacy may emerge if all the “smart devices” consumers have placed in their homes can become networked and then integrated into state surveillance systems. Unfortunately, something like this may be on the horizon, with Amazon, Google, and Apple beginning to collaborate on connecting their respective products together, under the name “Project Connected Home over IP.” At present, it is unclear whether this will make it easier or harder for unpermitted access to users’ systems, but it absolutely invites further corporate intervention in users’ homes—and all the considerable risks that involves.41
THE WIDER CONTEXT
Increasingly sophisticated information technologies and networks have assisted capitalist growth and domination. Behind the expansion and popularization of the World Wide Web was global capital, which stood to benefit greatly from improved access to, and connection between, markets and consumers. Thus, capitalism helped to birth the digital world that enables Amazon and other corporations in the modern era. Digital technology companies are the robber barons of the age—huge, muscular, and almost hegemonic. It is difficult to avoid interacting with them, especially after they have gutted local businesses that were previously sources for consumer products.
Amazon encourages people to be zealous consumers while it empowers states to monitor and control entire populations. If Amazon’s power and influence continues to grow, we will become consumers and state subjects only. Where is our free will when Amazon knows what we “want” (perhaps even before we do)? Or when the state can monitor all of our movements, with Amazon’s help? The incredible asymmetries of knowledge and power between corporations and citizens that exist under surveillance capitalism is not accidental or inevitable but reflects corporate interests in maximizing profits and social control, and the growing power and influence of large corporations.
The market position Amazon now occupies, its tremendous cache of personal user data, and the alarming human expectations it has created are troubling. It has empowered incredible corporations and governmental agencies, put everyday people at risk of manipulation and exploitation, and encouraged millions to take ongoing surveillance for granted. Presumably, if Amazon wasn’t doing all this, it would be just another corporation. The problem is not so much this one, singular bad actor, as it is an unregulated economic system that facilitates monopolies, crushes workers, and addicts and spies on consumers generally. Such a corporation is all but predictable under late capitalism’s neoliberal political economy. Amazon has become the dominant actor in e-commerce and its current edge is all but guaranteed by surveillance technologies, other corporations’ reliance upon AWS, and fang-less antitrust legislation. These trends will likely continue unless government intervention, civil society pressure, tactical obstruction from digital denizens and hacktivists, internal resistance by workers, or some combination of all, prevent Amazon’s advance. Instead, grassroots-led resistance involving citizens, labor, and social movements offer the best chances to create a more equitable and liberatory outcome.
Despite the formidable challenges to everyday people and workers and their privacy, there are avenues of resistance. To select one small example, when the Canonical corporation—which distributes the world’s most popular Linux operating system Ubuntu—pre-installed an app that would direct all internal searches (and thus personal information) to Amazon.com, an uproar occurred in the tech world. Canonical quickly created a way for Ubuntu users to disable the app (which users called “spyware”) and the controversy was the primary factor that led software privacy advocates to “fork” Ubuntu and create an Amazon-free Ubuntu operating system called Mint. Such small as well as substantial acts of resistance continue to occur, creating challenges in the face of Amazon’s march toward greater and greater profits and power.
In the future, transnational alliances to challenge the power of corporations like Amazon will be crucial. As an entity with international reach, Amazon not only has a wide capacity to cause harm, but is also open to attack everywhere, too. Coordinated actions—whether consumer boycotts or worker strikes, hactivist actions and online campaigns, or the creation of alternative technologies for a more cooperative economy or for computer-user privacy—offer great opportunity to resist surveillance capitalism and Amazon.42
NOTES
1. Walter M. Brasch, “Fool’s Gold in the Nation’s Data-mining Programs,” Social Science Computer Review 23(4) (2005): 401–428.
2. Jan Fernback, “Selling Ourselves? Profitable Surveillance and Online Communities,” Critical Discourse Studies 4(3) (2007): 311–330.
3. William Clyde Partin, “Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) (2019): 153–160.
4. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: