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Amazon’s all-seeing eye: surveillance capitalism must be brought to heel
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the spotlight is once again on Amazon’s dishonest business practices. A group of US consumers have brought a class-action lawsuit against Amazon — Kolotinsky v. Amazon.com — for spying deliberatedly and intentionally on millions of users via a software development kit provided to tens of thousands of app developers with a code known as Amazon Ads SDK, embedded in their apps, and that provided the company with a back door to obtain users’ timestamped geolocation.
This has allowed the company to illegally collect a huge amount of data on where consumers live, work, shop and what places they visit, and which will likely contain all kinds of confidential information, from religious affiliations to sexual orientations or health problems.
Sadly, most people are still unaware, or unconcerned, about the degree of surveillance we now live under: data about our private lives, our movements and our habits are systematically collected and sold without our consent. This criminal behavior is justified by Big Tech because we agree to it under the terms and conditions we agree to but never read when we install an app. Nevertheless, such behavior is still illegal, and wrongdoers must be fined heavily, forced to delete all illegally acquired data, and compensate the…