Amazon Sells Surveillance as a Service
City, (Image by the author)
The following is a blog post from Emily West, whose article “Amazon: Surveillance as a Service” can be found in the latest issue of Surveillance & Society.
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The idea that tech companies are watching us, and enriching themselves from our data, is at long last entering common sense. Amazon — with its expansion across business areas, its Prime membership, and its rapid innovations in the smart speaker and voice-controlled AI markets — is on the cutting edge of the data-hungry logic of platform capitalism. I developed this paper for this special issue of Surveillance & Society in order to counter the tendency to overlook Amazon relative to some of the other platform giants like Facebook and Google. Part of the reason we may tend to overlook Amazon is because of the tremendous trust, even intimacy, that it has built up over time with consumers, an intimacy that now allows it to be so effective in establishing relationships of surveillance.
The word “Surveillance” typically has an unpleasant, frightening association. And yet Amazon is unselfconsciously embracing surveillance as key to its business. Amazon, in fact, offers surveillance as a service to consumers in two distinct ways.
First, Amazon sells an array of products and services that consumers can use to conduct surveillance on their own domestic spaces. For example, Amazon acquired the company Ring in 2018, which makes Alexa-enabled doorbells and security cameras. Using the Ring doorbell that has a built-in camera, consumers can see who or what is on their doorstep without having to open the door, using their device from anywhere in the house, or even far from home.
Secondly, rather than surreptitious data collection (which of course it also does), Amazon increasingly offers surveillance as a key ingredient for providing personalized service. Central to this effort is Alexa and the suite of Echo devices. As Amazon explains to developers creating skills for Alexa, “Alexa should remember context and past interactions, as well as knowing a customer’s location and meaningful details in order to maintain familiarity and be more efficient in future exchanges.” Amazon encourages the experience of having one’s self and one’s needs seen by another, and catered to. At the same time, it normalizes surveillance by a corporate entity, made warm and familiar through the persona of Alexa.
Why should we care about all this? Because, on the one hand, infrastructures of surveillance change the nature of our domestic spaces and the very possibility of private moments. But perhaps more urgently, because we can’t predict how these systems may be used against our interests. Whether via a hack, or through cooperation with authorities, the widespread adoption of Amazon’s “smart” devices is creating an infrastructure of domestic surveillance that will no doubt be tempting for government, as well as for corporate America and Amazon itself, to use in ways beyond what consumers agree to, or even imagine.
This paper draws from research I’m doing for a book manuscript entitled Branding Ubiquity: Amazon, Digital Distribution, and Platform Capitalism, under contract with The MIT Press.
