Amazon has changed significantly since selling books online in a garage near Seattle, Washington, early on. Today, the company is a top Internet business, offering the world's largest online marketplace in addition to cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and streaming services. In his journey from bookseller to tech giant, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the richest man on the planet.
In the film, Amazon insiders say that from the very beginning of the company, Bezos has been working on mining data to understand what customers think. "Bezos was an algorithmic trader before he started Amazon, so he was very convinced of his roots, which is that you can make money from data," said David Salinger, who worked early on in the company's drive for data monetization.
Bezos has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new technologies. He created a customer behavior research team that analyzed shoppers' clicks and used that information to create their virtual profiles.
Fifteen years after Bezos launched his project, Berlin-based privacy activist Katharina Nocun asked Amazon for her data history. She was shocked to find that more than 15,000 pieces of information about her had been collected through just 100 purchases. Through a simple clickstream — a history of her behavior on Amazon's website — Nocun discovers how much Amazon knows about her personal life.
Amazon says the data tracking it practices is used to improve the user experience. But by understanding our browsing and buying habits, companies can not only guide our shopping behavior through ads and offers, but also influence our social behavior, said Hamed Haddadi, senior lecturer at the Dyson School of Design and Engineering in London.
"Once you have the ability to do these campaigns [in real time] against millions of people, then you have this uncontrolled superpower to push those people to buy specific products, click on specific articles, believe in certain ideologies," he said. "[It's] a massive manipulation of society."
Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa has been providing weather updates, playing music and turning on the lights with simple voice commands for hundreds of millions of people in the nearly six years since its launch.
But the technology's ability to record our conversations raises concerns. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, said Amazon is very actively getting involved in our real lives.
Amazon plans to increase the degree of automation in every room in our home, so the potential for information gathering is endless. The company has grown from a bookseller to an online retail giant to one of the world's largest data mining entities.
Amazon has invested in other technologies, such as the Ring doorbell camera, which allows users to see who is at their front door. Its video streams are used to create neighborhood surveillance programs, which Amazon has shared with local law enforcement agencies. It makes the company a partner in the surveillance and policing industry.
Amazon has also developed a fleet of delivery drones that can provide aerial home monitoring and detect unclosed doors, broken windows, graffiti and people inside buildings.
Amazon employees were so shocked that they wrote anonymously to their bosses. "Our company should not be in the surveillance business. We shouldn't be in police business," one of them said. "Knowing that my work might go... Monitoring the creation and extension of the status, I'm really worried,"
There is no doubt that the progress of science and technology all kinds of electronic products have greatly facilitated our lives, but from another point of view, every electronic device is a source of information and data for a company, which is pervasive, openly collecting each of our clicks, sounds, images, etc. Personal information, snooping on the privacy of users, and even building various models to use big data to judge the KPIs, efficiency, and certain jobs are being replaced by machines.
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