Tech

Inside Amazon’s Spy Campaign Against Its Own Workers

Another example of how corporate espionage is completely out of control.
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Since the War On Terror kicked off two decades ago, the surveillance industry has boomed, with private intelligence companies now accounting for many billions of dollars in the global economy. Perhaps more frightening is the ways in which nation-state surveillance campaigns and run of the mill spy techniques have pervaded almost every level of our society: Some people spy on their partners using stalkerware, vast criminal networks have access to hyper sophisticated encrypted phones, and sometimes the richest company in the world infiltrates and spies on groups of its own workers.

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That was the case after Motherboard recently uncovered how Amazon has for years deployed a secret program of trained professionals spying on the private Facebook groups used by Amazon Flex drivers to communicate with one another, chat about their days, and discuss ways in which their jobs could be better. But it appears Amazon, a company that has long resisted the unionization of its workers, kept an eye on the drivers in case they were “planning for any strike or protest against Amazon.” 

To talk about this scoop we have one of the reporters of the story, Lauren Kaori Gurley, on CYBER to talk about the inside story of Amazon’s internal spy campaign.