What do large corporations know about us? They know our name, surname, email address, birthday, home address. But this is the stuff we are willingly giving to them so we can use their services, usually for free. What do they really know about us? Panorama documentary Amazon: What They Know About Us, investigates Amazon's rise to superpower and asks whether there is a dark side to our love affair with the company.
Notes from the documentary:
Shoshana Zuboff argues they have so much knowledge about us. What we know about them is a pittance compared to what they can know about us. We are not customers. We are a raw material to these companies.
In 1994 website growing at 2400%
Customer obsession is the KEY. starting with the customer and working backwards
The whole mission is to make the customer happy.
Amazon focused on data in 1997
Knowing how customers behaved was itself a valuable commodity.
That data allows them to predict what item they would like, that they haven't discovered yet.
"Huge laboratory with 30 mill people a month, a real-life experiment"
Using digital DNA, their clicks to creat s profile about them.
Pulled a single customer and try to understand who she was. THIS IS WHAT THEY DID AT THE VERY BEGINNING.
CLICK STREAM HISTORY. A privacy advocate asked Amazon for this. 100 buys generated 1500 prices of info about her.
Could even track what else they were looking at online. Not on Amazon.
What's going on not is much more invasive and manipulating.
MONETIZE EYEBALLS.
Personalising Amazon for each individual customer.
2007 could predict what we buy in the future.
Could anticipate what you are likely to need next. Meet demands we may not even realise we have.
Even the most loyal customers can't avoid Amazon
PRIME causing the end for brick and mortar ships like bookshops.
CUSTOMERS: GREEDY, LAZY SND HORNEY. Amazon exploits the first two.
EU competition commission investigating Amazon. If it finds it has abused, maybe funded 10% of annual global turnover.
Suffolk police have joined forces with Amazon who has given them around 1000 ring doorbells to hand out to residents in Ipswich. This encouraged other residents to buy them.
Amazon has turned policeman into salespeople.
This is raising privacy concerns
Suffolk Leicestershire and the met have received free doorbells from Ring.
it's not marketed as a surveillance device, it's marketed as a device to make a customer's life simpler. - from Amazon person.
Amazon has created a digital neighbourhood watch scheme. a network of cameras and shared footage.
In the US, 913 police forces contacted the neighbour's app and request footage with residence permission and without a warrant.
concerns that Amazon's neighbourhoods app will be introduced in the United Kingdom. If this happened it would change the dynamics of surveillance from simply community reassurance to estate form of surveillance full stop this lays a foundation for a network that may cause concerns for people that don't want to live in a society that is embellished in surveillance cameras. We could end up in a surveillance state.
The future of amazon.com.au prime air. Using delivery drones to get people with their packages. however, another use was highlighted, using delivery drones for aerial home security camera detecting doors' left open broken Windows graffiti and whether people are inside buildings. Amazon calls this SURVEILLANCE AS A SERVICE
AMAZON THE WORK IS GOING TOWARDS THE CREATION AND EXPANSION OF A SURVEILLANCE STATE.
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SZ- VOICE TERROR BEGINS TO OPEN NEW KINDS OF DOORS FOR AMAZON. Frictionless form of communication, therefore creating a basis for frictionless commerce. Simply speak and it shall be done.
Amazon is branching out to real life and is doing this very aggressively
it wants to have the entire environment, everything we do from when you wake up to when we go to sleep, essentially miked
The voice and ours to understand what your emotional state is, how you're engaging with your family, and that creates the most powerful predictive datasets of all
WE ARE CONTRIBUTING TO SYSTEMS THAT ARE FUNDAMENTALLY AT ODDS WITH DEMOCRACY AND THAT SWORDS WITH HUMAN FREEDOM
A company has so much knowledge about us that it can use that knowledge to predict our behaviour. This is an extraordinary kind of power that has never existed before.
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Amazon's ambition, a future where most things can be Alexa enabled
In 2014 Amazon was granted a patent to use targeted algorithms by using sniffle words.
Keywords can be turned into adverts for specific things you mentioned.
LARGE SCALE MANIPULATION OF SOCIETY
It's ALL ABOUT THE DATA. WHOEVER OWNS IT IS KING.
Reference list:
BBC. (2020). BBC One - Panorama, Amazon: What They Know About Us. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fjdz (Accessed: 3 March 2020).
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