Data is the new oil they say. Many companies are paying billions of dollars to get their hands on valuable datasets. But what if customer data is naturally available to you? It becomes your responsibility to handle it with care and protect it. Amazon, the largest e-commerce company in the world might just be the one who requires to get their basics about data protection right.
Amazon employees have easy access to your data
According to an investigation by The Wired, Amazon employees are snooping on the purchases made by celebrities and have access to the vast trove of customers’ data.
The report also claimed that some low-level employees at Amazon are using their data privileges to snoop on the purchases of celebrities. At the same time, the report also alleged that others were taking bribes to help shady sellers sabotage competitors’ businesses, doctor Amazon’s review system, and sell knock-off products to unsuspecting customers.
Despite Amazon’s customer-first mentality, company officials seem to have failed to prioritize securing its customers’ most personal information.
“Millions of credit card numbers had sat in the wrong place on Amazon’s internal network for years, with the security team unable to establish definitively whether they’d been unduly accessed,” the report alleged.
According to the report, Amazon has access to what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and who’s at your front door. This data has become so sprawling, fragmented, and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn’t even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders.
Amazon defends by highlighting its exceptional track record of protecting customer data
An Amazon spokesperson defended the company by highlighting “an exceptional track record of Amazon in protecting customer data”.
The fact that Amazon’s privacy and security issues are extensively documented with extensive review from senior leadership highlights our commitment to these issues and demonstrates the vigilance with which we identify, escalate, and respond to potential risks, the spokesperson was quoted as saying.
In 2020, during an antitrust hearing, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that employees don’t access the data. However, he couldn’t guarantee that the policy prohibiting employees from doing so “wasn’t violated”.
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