French regulator fines Amazon $35 million over its surveillance system of warehouse workers
French regulator fines Amazon $35 million over its surveillance system of warehouse workers
France’s data privacy watchdog, the CNIL, has fined Amazon’s logistics subsidiary in France €32 million ($35 million).
Seriously someone smarter then me do the fucking math. How many minutes of profit is that for them?
Conservatively:
Amazon makes approximately 800k per minute, so in about 45 minutes they’ve recouped their money. Make it one hour just to cover all other costs, lawyers, etc involved in this.
They reported 9.9 billion in profit for their third quarter last year, so I think 458 minutes of profit from that quarter.
I assumed 90 days in the quarter, or 129,600 minutes.
So dollar or minute wise, that comes out to a 00.35% penalty to that quarter.
Edit: Which isn't even close to the 36 minutes in that article, so I'd err on me being the wrong one.
Edit 2: I think I see the difference, I was looking at their profit, not their revenue.
Your calculations look right to me. That's a little under eight hours of profit.
We need percentage based fees....
Make it a 10% of the quartely gross or something depending on the severity.
About 36 minutes according to this article
Next time make it 35 mil each day the system is up.
The penalty isn't the main good thing coming from it - it's the fact that now the system is deemed illegal unions/workers councils and local inspectors can easily go after it on a local level. This is actually far more powerful than one might think, as the local government inspectors are the ones that can really put the pressure on the companies. (E.g. Amazon got ordered to shut down part of a main distribution center due to insufficient workers protection once - that really really hurts them as the lost profit is worth more than the penalties)
The francogermanophone system works slightly differently here, that's why it's often "disappointing" from lay persons POV, but it works - just not by extremly high penalties.(These come from the fact that we don't really know class action law suits - there are some new ways for them, but generally it's not an often used instrument )
That’s exactly what I came in here to say. Unless this is a cumulative fine that gets worse over time, Amazon will simply consider it a cost of doing business.
Sadly, that's still chump change to Amazon. They divert those resources to lobbying to remove that law.
Not sure what the answer is
lobbying to remove that law
Pffft this is France, not some third world shitehole
Cut off Jeff Bezos' head !
i honestly wonder how you become so morally bankrupt and empty inside that you design these sort of worker tracking tools. killing people in a war somehow seems more benign, or more naturalistic than slowly whittling down people's will to live by not giving them bathroom breaks in order to save someone else a microscopic amount of money
As someone who has worked for investment banks, it's incremental and everyone is either focused on some small aspect that is "not so bad", or so above and detached that it is not real to them. The individuals are people who are thinking, feeling, but the system is a machine that is most definitely not.
The top level though, the people who have insight into how this works, and power to change it and lose a miniscule amount of money, now those are the scum of the earth. Just don't blame the worker.
Don't be so quick to count out middle managers. These are the people who are tracking the results and metrics, sanitizing reports, and saying and doing whatever they need to cover their own ass over the employees they're responsible for.
They hear there's a monitoring solution that increases productivity, they deploy it no matter what effect it has on the workers, and then the only word they feed back up the chain is how great everything is going.
I think the issue is also that they make money by doing that, so the system is rewarding them for it, hard to think you're doing wrong when you receive continuous rewards that allow you to live better than most people. A nice city apartment for you and your loved ones tends to make you forget about those little work ethical issues.
Oh wow, take that, Amazon! I hope they don't financially recover from this.
They are considering appealing but not too strongly considering because that's boring and this is just like me considering appealing a $35 parking ticket. Part of me wants to but it's just. $35 and I'd probably have to get up early and shit.
yeah but did they take it down? If I built an illegal structure they would fine me every day until I took it down
They have been instructed to take them down and will have to pay a further daily fine for every day they're not complying (given, the fine is not a way to get away with it, it's just to make them act quickly on the matter; they could go to court again if they fail to comply in the long run).
Why not make it 35 billion?? They can afford it
When the punishment is a fine, it’s only a crime if you’re poor. 
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The CNIL says that Amazon France Logistique has implemented a “surveillance system” that is “overly intrusive.”
In particular, the CNIL is focusing on the warehouse barcode scanner and Amazon’s data gathering practices related to the connected device.
When an order is processed, an Amazon picker grabs a product, scans it with the connected scanner and puts it into a crate so that it can be shipped to the customer.
“More generally, the CNIL considered excessive to keep all the data collected by the system, as well as the resulting statistical indicators, for all employees and temporary workers, for a period of 31 days,” the French regulator wrote.
“We strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and we might appeal the decision,” Amazon wrote.
And in more details, Amazon says that the “stow machine gun” indicator has been created so that workers can inspect products before they are stored to make sure that they aren’t damaged.
The original article contains 559 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
From the article:
Both the “idle time”, which indicates a period of scanner downtime of ten minutes or more, and the “latency under ten minutes”, which tracks scanner interruptions between one and ten minutes are deemed illegal by the CNIL when it comes to data processing. The CNIL is using the GDPR as the legal basis of the case.
Amazon has also implemented a “stow machine gun” indicator to prevent mistakes. It signals an error if you scan an item less than 1.25 seconds after scanning the previous item. It sounds like a way to prevent double-scanning mistakes. But that’s a GDPR issue too, according to the CNIL.
I think these all seem like entirely reasonable things for Amazon to track.
Yeah, the headline makes it sound like they had cameras in the toilets or something.
Are you tracked down to 10 minute intervals at your job?
No, but I'm not paid hourly - if I sit around idle, I'm generally just wasting my own time.