The IT Nerd

Amazon can likely afford this. Though they won’t be happy about cutting this cheque. Amazon has been issued with a fine of 746 million euros ($887 million) by a European privacy watchdog for breaching the bloc’s data protection laws:

The fine, disclosed by Amazon on Friday in a securities filing, was issued two weeks ago by Luxembourg’s privacy regulator. The Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection said Amazon’s processing of personal data did not comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. It has ordered Amazon to revise certain undisclosed business practices.

Amazon, which has its European headquarters in Luxembourg, denied that there had been any kind of breach that would violate the GDPR rules. “Maintaining the security of our customers’ information and their trust are top priorities,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. “There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party,” they added.

When I see any of these words:

• maintaining
• protecting
• upholding

In a sentence with any of these words:

• our customers’
• clients’
• users’

That includes any of these words:

• trust
• safety
• information

Combined with any of these words:

• is our top priority
• duty
• first thought

My first thought is they must have done something really bad. And the company knows it. Thus while nobody is saying what Amazon did to get slapped with this fine, you can bet that it wasn’t trivial.

Amazon is a pretty invasive company when it comes to monitoring your activities. And it looks like they’re going next level on that front. They have won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers’ sleep habits:

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday granted Amazon.com Inc. approval to use a radar sensor to sense motion and “enable contactless sleep tracing functionalities.” Amazon on June 22 asked the FCC, which regulates airwave uses, for permission to market a device that uses radar. The technology captures movement in three dimensions, enabling a user to control its features through simple gestures and movements, the company said in a filing. The capability, according to Amazon, could help people with “with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments,” and it could monitor sleep with a high degree of precision.

Do I really want Amazon monitoring my sleep? Yes there is sleep monitoring from Apple for example. But I know that my sleep data from my Apple Watch stays with me. Where is the data that Amazon is gathering going? What is Amazon going to do with it? It’s likely too early to answer that question. But I think we should be asking that question now seeing as you are likely to be seeing products with this tech coming soon from Amazon. And by that point it may be too late to have that conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about Tile signing a deal to utilize Amazon’s ‘Sidewalk’ network so that it could better compete agains Apple’s Find My network. At the time I didn’t think it was going to do much for Tile. But it now appears that I might have wrong about that as more details about Amazon’s ‘Sidewalk’ network are starting to surface. And not all of those details are good:

The idea behind is actually really smart–make it possible for smart home devices to serve as a sort of bridge between your WiFi connection and one another. That way, if your Ring doorbell, for example, isn’t located close to your WiFi router, but it happens to near an Echo Dot, it can use Sidewalk to stay connected.

The same is true if your internet connection is down. Your smart devices can connect to other smart devices, even if they aren’t in your home. The big news on this front is that Tile is joining the Sidewalk network on June 14. That means that if you lose a Tile tracker, it can connect to any of the millions of Echo or Ring devices in your neighborhood and send its location back to you.

That’s definitely a nice benefit, but it’s also where things get a little murky from a privacy standpoint. That’s because other people’s devices, like your neighbor’s, can also connect to your network.

Amazon is pretty clear that Sidewalk uses three layers of encryption so that no data is shared between say, someone’s Tile tracker and your network. The signal from the Tile is encrypted all the way back to the Tile app on your iPhone or Android smartphone.

Still, a feature like this seems like the type of thing you’d want some control over. If suddenly my devices are going to start connecting to my neighbor’s WiFi, or theirs to mine, it seems like you’d have to opt-in, right?

Nope.

That’s because Amazon has enabled Sidewalk on every capable device by default. Whether or not you want your device connecting to other devices, or want your neighbors connecting to your WiFi, Amazon went ahead and made Sidewalk opt-out.

I can see why Amazon went this route. It needs all the devices that it can to make ‘Sidewalk’ work. But options like this should be opt-in rather than opt-out. Especially since I don’t exactly trust Amazon with my data. So if this bothers you, here’s how you can opt-out using the Alexa app’s More tab (at the bottom): Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk > Enabled.

So this will lead to the inevitable question about whether Apple’s Find My functionality is on by default. From what I recall it isn’t and during the setup process of an iDevice you have to turn it on. But I would love confirmation of that. If you happen to know for sure, drop me a comment or leave a note and let me know.

European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform:

The EU’s executive commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company. The commission said it takes issue with Amazon’s systematic use of non-public business data to avoid “the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance” for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU. The EU started looking into Amazon in 2018 and has been focusing on its dual role as a marketplace and retailer. In addition to selling its own products, the U.S. company allows third-party retailers to sell their own goods through its site. Last year, more than half of the items sold on Amazon worldwide were from these outside merchants. Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition, said it’s not a problem that Amazon is a successful business but “our concern is very specific business conduct which appears to distort genuine competition.” Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

Well, this isn’t good news for Amazon as this could be the start of a number of countries looking into the way that Amazon does business as the EU tends to be the bellwether for this sort of thing. Hopefully for Amazon’s sake, they have all their ducks in a row. Because this is going to get rocky.