French Regulator Fines Amazon $35 Million Over ‘Excessively Intrusive’ Monitoring
Amazon is in hot water in France, with a data compliance regulator slapping the e-commerce giant with a fine for setting up an “excessively intrusive system” for monitoring warehouse employees.
The French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), which fined Amazon 32 million euros ($34.7 million), takes issue with the handheld scanners that employees use to track their performance levels in real time. The scanners measure tasks such as storing or removing items from shelves and packing.
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CNIL says the data was stored and used to calculate the quality, productivity and periods of inactivity of each employee.
Amazon was also fined for neglecting to inform workers that their facilities were equipped with video surveillance systems, including surveillance software that was “not sufficiently secure” due to a weak password and shared access across several users.
The regulator gave multiple reasons for labeling the monitoring system as excessive, first in tracking the inactivity time of employees. The CNIL ruled that it was illegal to set up a system measuring work interruptions “with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.”
The agency also criticized the system for measuring scanning speed. One such “stow machine gun” indicator calculated whether an item had been scanned in less than 1.25 seconds after the previous one, signaling an error that the employee scanned too fast.
More generally, the CNIL considered it excessive that the system keeps and collects the data and results for all employees and temporary workers for 31 days. The committee found that, until April 2020, temporary workers for Amazon were not properly informed that their data would be collected by the scanning devices.
The CNIL said it did not question that the “very heavy constraints” on Amazon’s business, and the high-performance targets that the tech titan has set itself, can justify the scanner system put in place to manage its business.
However, the regulator said it considered that the data retention and performance tracking as “disproportionate overall.”
Amazon disagrees with the fine, saying that the company offered the CNIL repeated invitations to its warehouses, yet no case handler representing the agency visited the sites before conducting the case.
“We strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions which are factually incorrect and we reserve the right to file an appeal,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “Warehouse management systems are industry standard and are necessary for ensuring the safety, quality, and efficiency of operations and to track the storage of inventory and processing of packages on time and in line with customer expectations.”
To determine the penalty, the committee considered that the processing of employee data using scanners was different from traditional activity monitoring methods due to the scale on which they were implemented, “both by their exhaustiveness and their permanence, and led to very close and detailed monitoring of employees’ work.”
“Such systems kept employees under close surveillance for all tasks carried out with scanners and thus put them under continuous pressure,” the statement said.
The fine was announced Tuesday, the same day that members of the European Parliament blasted Amazon management for refusing to attend a hearing on working conditions in its warehouses. This comes after Amazon canceled a visit by a Parliament delegation to its warehouses in Germany and Poland scheduled for last December.
Elsewhere in Amazon’s vast logistics network, multiple tractor trailers outside a company distribution center in Memphis, Tenn. were broken into on Monday.
According to local police, a security guard reported seeing four people wearing dark-colored clothing pull up in a brown truck before accessing multiple trailers. The guard could not tell officers which truck had been burglarized, but police said they found one trailer with a broken seal on the side of the road. Local CBS news affiliate WREG photographed several yellow containers filled with an assortment of items spread out on the ground.
The Memphis Police Department is still searching for suspects, but does not have any video surveillance of the incident.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company was working directly with local law enforcement in their investigation.
The theft came after a weekend where Amazon truck drivers were stuck outside of the distribution center for at least three days, unable to get their trailers unloaded.
The drivers said sought to drop off their deliveries at the Amazon warehouse on after a winter storm blanketed the Mid-South earlier in the week. According to a spokesperson, the weather conditions affected water pressure at the facility, which limited operations at the end of the week.
Another instance of attempted cargo theft occurred in Memphis on the Thursday prior, when a group of people tried to break into an Amazon truck that had jackknifed and got stuck the road because of ice.
More than 10 people tried to break into the truck, but left when the driver confronted them before police showed up.
