Today, Explained - Big Bezos is watching you

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

In under 20 years, Amazon grew from an online bookstore to the eyes and ears in our homes. OneZero's Will Oremus says we should be concerned about what comes next. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we begin the show today, a quick note about KiwiCo.com slash explained. That's K-I-W-I-C-O.com slash explained. It's a website where you get the chance to try your first month of KiwiCo projects out for free. Those are the educational projects you've heard about on this show before, surely. They're great for the young person you know, the older person you know, the middle-aged person you know. what is age even? Check out KiwiCo.com slash explained. So it's the mid-90s. Jeff Bezos is working at a hedge fund, I believe in New York. And he hears this statistic that usage of the worldwide web is growing by something like 2300% per year. He's blown away. How can I capitalize on that? How can I get in on that growth? And so he starts thinking, well, what could I sell on the worldwide web? And I picked books as the first best product to sell online, which are making a list of like 20 different products that you might be able to sell. And books were great as the first best, because books are incredibly unusual in one respect,

and that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far. By 1998, it started expanding gradually and carefully to other categories. So it started with selling music CDs, and by 1999, it was expanding gradually and carefully to other categories. So it started with selling music CDs, and by 1999, it was selling home improvement products and computer software and video games. And starting in 2000, the Amazon logo actually had an arrow that points from the A in Amazon to the Z in Amazon, implying that they would eventually be selling everything from A to Z. In 2007, it launched the Kindle.

One of the great things about electronic books is they don't go out of stock. It's easy to forget how revolutionary that was at the time. And this is way before iPads. It was the year that the iPhone came out, but smartphones hadn't fully caught on yet. And Amazon has, in the years since since expanded into a very large and fast growing hardware business. Of course, as we now know, it sells online media, streaming services. The priest is quite hot. It's so hot.

It has Amazon Web Services, which powers so much of the Internet. It's the back end for so many of the websites and apps we use. Amazon Web Services is arguably the most disruptive business in all of technology as you mentioned. It has Whole Foods which it acquired in 2017. Amazon is already pushing its own tech products between the quinoa and baby kale. And it has a startup that I think we'll be talking about some today, Ring, which it acquired in 2018. It's a reported 1 billion dollar acquisition making it one of Amazon's biggest purchases. If you are alive in the United States today,

there is a very good chance you're interacting with Amazon in some way. It has over 100 million subscribers to Amazon Prime. That's as of January 2019. Estimates are that it controls about 37% of the U.S. e-commerce market, so of all online sales, and about 4% of all retail spending in the United States, which is just staggering for a single business. And if you are using the internet at all, you're going to a website that's powered by Amazon. When Amazon Web Services, its cloud business, goes down, half the internet goes out. You can't use anything. Like most Americans, Will Remus uses Amazon for something. Be it books, bananas, back-end web services, asking Alexa something, watching Fleabag, surveilling the neighborhood, whatever.

Unlike most Americans, Will thinks Amazon has way too much of our information. He wrote about the host of privacy concerns presented by Amazon's everywhere-ness for the website OneZero. Amazon kind of got a pass for several years while tech journalism and advocacy turned its attention to online advertising as a threat to privacy. And Amazon was kind of untouched by it because everybody thought of Amazon as this company that just, you know, you buy stuff on their site and then it shows up at your door. And what could be creepy about that, right? Well, it got a lot creepier in 2018 when it acquired Ring. And I think it has finally started to get some of the privacy scrutiny that the other tech giants get. Okay, let's start with the Ring.

What's up with this service? The e-commerce giant announced yesterday it has officially closed the deal to buy the home security device company Ring. It's a reported $1 billion acquisition, making it one of Amazon's biggest purchases. This was a startup called DoorBot. It changed its name to Ring. Amazon bought it in early 2018. And by market research, it's the leader in the smart doorbell sector, which is just booming. The device is a Wi-Fi enabled doorbell that streams live audio and HD video. It lets users see what's happening on their property and even communicate with visitors even when no one's home. Ring is different from other security

camera companies in that it has this social network attached to it. It's called Neighbors. There's an app on your phone where everybody in your neighborhood who has a Ring device can upload videos of stuff they think is suspicious or stuff they think is just funny or stuff they just have questions about, share it with everybody else in the neighborhood. So I actually don't have a Ring device at my house, but I did download the Neighbors app for research. And now I get notifications anytime any of my neighbors saw something they think was suspicious. So there's basically now this de facto dragnet on residential streets all over the country, and it's growing so fast. Where does the ring fit into the increasing number of cameras we see everywhere we go, especially when you live in a city like New York or Washington, D.C.? Well, what's interesting about the Ring to me is that it

brings individuals, like just individual homeowners and renters, into this world of surveillance and makes us a part of it, makes us complicit in it. I mean, it's not brand new that we have the ability to surveil people, but it is new to put that in the hands of individuals and to distribute it in homes all around the country. I think the geographic reach of surveillance cameras, thanks largely to Ring and then to other competitors, it has to have grown by a multiple.

And if we're inching down the spectrum of Amazon's ability to surveil us, Ring starts to get a little creepy and weird. What comes next? Next, I would put recognition. This is recognition with a K instead of a C. Like the band Korn. Sure, right. It is the product within Amazon Web Services, which again is Amazon's cloud business. It is a feature that they sell to clients. So these are companies and sometimes it's government agencies or police departments. And what this feature does is uses cutting edge AI to identify faces in photos or in video.

So if you have been taking surveillance footage, whether it's with, you know, probably not with Ring because recognition isn't integrated with Ring at the moment. But if you've been taking surveillance footage because you're a police department or a security company, you can upload that and have recognition look through it and compare it to a database of faces and see if any names pop up, see if there's any suspicious people there. And so now we're talking about not only being surveilled in public spaces all around the country, but the camera, without any human having to be involved, the camera could potentially be accessing software, be connected to software that can say that's Will Arimas in this photo and he was here at this time and here's what he was doing.

And a complicating factor here is that Amazon doesn't exist in just some private bubble where they exist as a company that aims to make profits. As you mentioned, Amazon is the back end of how much of our internet? Estimates vary. So if you're looking at sheer number of websites, it's pretty small. It's like maybe 5%. But if you're looking at a metric like traffic or popular websites, it's closer to 50%. Yeah. And they got some pretty high profile clients, right? They do. So if you use the workplace chat app Slack, Slack relies on Amazon Web Services. Pinterest relies on Amazon Web Services. Netflix uses Amazon Web Services. Now, I should say that

doesn't mean that you're being surveilled or that face recognition is being used on you every time you use Netflix. That's not the case. That's a product that right now Amazon sells to a relatively small number of clients, as I understand it. But Amazon does have grand ambitions for this, and they competed for a very high-profile contract with the Department of Defense, the U.S. DoD, to run their cloud, basically, to be the back end for everything the DoD does. There's a whole separate controversy over that because Microsoft won the deal and Amazon is suing. But the point is that Amazon, their ambition is to serve police departments, homeland security, government agencies of all kinds.

Well, I wonder, what do you see the future of Amazon looking like? I mean, in 20 years, they've gone from an internet bookseller to on the street for connected devices, sort of like a Bluetooth kind of thing, but something that would power smart cities and smart stoplights. And, you know, they showed a use case where you could use it to track your dog. If your dog gets lost, it can keep sensing it and keep the dog's collar connected to the internet so you can see where it is. Amazon acquired a wireless router company called Aero, E-E-R-O, and they have integrated Alexa so that your routers around your home will be listening. I mean, it would be premature to say that Amazon is big brother because our Alexa devices are not trying to spy on us. And the ring doorbells, that's not connected with face recognition at this point. It's completely separate. And all these things have some level of privacy protection built in. They're not all integrated into one vast

surveillance network. But I don't think it's premature to say that they could be and that we should be worried about that prospect and that we should be applying a lot of scrutiny to how these various products get integrated by Amazon. I think it goes back to that question of where aren't we being surveilled now? Like, where can we go anymore without the possibility that we're being watched,

that our face is being recognized by software? And I think the number of those kinds of spaces is rapidly diminishing, thanks to Ring and Recognition and other products like those. It's hard to say precisely what could go wrong. It's more that I think a world in which there's no privacy is, you know, something has already gone wrong.

And then the specific ways that'll play out, I guess, remain to be seen. I was at a holiday party this weekend where gifts were being exchanged. And go figure, one of the gifts that was exchanged in front of my very eyes was a subscription to KiwiCo. And it got a little awkward because everyone looked at me like, explain the gift to this guy who doesn't know what KiwiCo is. And I was like, I do this professionally, not for fun on Sundays. But needless to say, the person who received it, a father of five, a gentleman in his late 30s, his name's Doug. Shout outs to Doug, a great guy. He really enjoyed the KiwiCo subscription idea.

He's a builder, a tinkerer, and seemed like he couldn't wait to dig his hands into a KiwiCo crate. And the nice thing about Doug with the five kids is that the five kids will probably enjoy the things that Doug ends up making through KiwiCo. You can be just like Doug by going to KiwiCo.com slash explained.

You can try KiwiCo out for one month for free even. That website again is KiwiCo.com slash explained. Or you can not be like Doug. You can be like Colleen who gave Doug the KiwiCo subscription because it's sometimes referred to as the giving season, the season we're in right now. Think about Doug and Colleen and KiwiCo. Well, it feels a lot like you're concerned about a dystopian future where Amazon can do real damage and that it's a concern that most people who use Amazon's services don't share.

Let's freak people out. What's your worst case scenario? There's this movie that I think is underrated, Enemy of the State. It was pretty popular when it came out. I fucking love that movie, Will. Robert Clayton Dean was innocent. It's a great movie. It was Will Smith, Gene Hackman

I think Will Smith was like either rightly or wrongly identified as having something that the government wanted, that the NSA or some shadowy government agency wanted Wrongly identified Framed, framed Jason Lee from like

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he's playing some like hacker dude. Oh, you know this stuff. This is great. And he runs into a lingerie store as he's being chased by NSA agents. And Will Smith is in there buying some sexy unspeakables for his wife. Hey, it's me, Bobby Dean. We were in Georgetown together. You okay? And the hacker dude throws the thing in Will Smith's lingerie bag so he becomes the possessor of this government data without even knowing it and the government ruins his life.

Yes, and this was, alright, I'm so glad you know this, you know it much better than I do, but this was so prescient because what happens for the rest of the film is that the government is able to marshal all of the surveillance resources in society that we didn't know it could marshal we didn't know it had access to. I mean you know we got the blimp cam, we got the police officer cam, we've got two ATM cameras but this is the one showing promise. This is the security camera at the underwear store freeze there. And it's able to track him no matter where he goes. He cannot escape its sights. It's a good action flick, but it is also, I think,

a picture of the future that Amazon and other companies are helping to build, where if you're wrongly identified or if somebody's after you or if the government is oppressing you or whatever, there will be no escape. And we see real-world examples starting to crop up, in particular in China, where the Chinese government has been marshalling all the technology it can use

to track the Uyghur ethnic minority. And China is obviously a different country than the United States. The government is different. A lot of things are different. It's not happening right now in the United States. But if we want a worst case scenario, we should keep our eye on what is happening in countries where authoritarian regimes are using access to all the surveillance

infrastructure that has been built, some of it private, to oppress people and to track them everywhere they go and to take away all their freedom. And I guess you could look at these two examples, Amazon in the United States and just the Chinese government and its relationship to Chinese enterprise and say, oh, those are pretty different. But as you related earlier, Amazon is very much courting government contracts and already has some, right? Yeah. And in fact, Ring, it's a big prong of their strategy to work with local police departments all around the country. I think the latest report I saw had them working with something like 600 local police departments already. And when you think about it, Ring and Amazon are actually, they're much bigger and more powerful than these local

police departments. And we've seen some great reporting, some public information requests of documents that show how Amazon tells the police departments exactly how to handle everything, what to say, what not to say, how to handle the PR. Amazon is basically directing these local police departments on exactly how it wants them to use and talk about Ring and its surveillance capabilities. This might be a little paranoid, but it's like Amazon's almost like a puppet master that's controlling the public agencies rather than the public agencies really being in control. Is the government doing anything to stop Amazon? To slow it down, I guess? Yeah, not much. When we talk about digital privacy regulation, we're usually talking about that other

kind of privacy, the privacy on your computer, on your mobile device. That's where the conversation still is. There has not been a lot of discussion about how to curtail the spread of surveillance. And one exception is San Francisco passed a law earlier this year that said public agencies could not use face recognition. Portland, Oregon recently went a step further and was working on a law that said there can be neither public nor private uses of face recognition within Portland. So cities have been kind of the earliest laboratory for putting some kind of check on the spread of surveillance. But at the federal level, there's not a lot. We've got a couple senators who are asking questions, writing letters, asking for information. But one thing I will say, I mean, I think regulation would be the most

effective deterrent from building systems that can be easily abused. But I do think public pressure makes a difference. In my career of covering technology companies, when the chorus of criticism grows loud enough, when consumers actually start boycotting a product because they're concerned about privacy or about ethical considerations, the companies listen. Their goal is not to be evil. Jeff Bezos, I don't think, is an evil person. I think they would prefer to do good if they can, but they are first and foremost concerned with building their business and building new products. And so the public has to help and the media has to help set up the incentives for them to not do bad stuff. If we can impose a cost on being wanton with their privacy violations or being thoughtless or irresponsible in how they design their products, I would love to see them forced

to take it more and more seriously because consumers and the media and advocacy groups and legislators are taking it more seriously. Obviously, there are very grave concerns about privacy when it comes to Amazon. We've been discussing them and the company has received criticism. How does it respond to it? I think until very recently, Amazon did not get that privacy was a serious concern with its products. They felt that they understood how their products work and they didn't see any privacy problems. And so anybody who did just didn't understand the product. And so they had this really dismissive attitude. I remember on a podcast, I actually asked Amazon's VP of Alexa, what's one privacy concern you think is really legitimate? What's one that you think is really a challenge that you're working on?

I don't really have one for a response for that. I feel there isn't really anything that falls in that category that I'm aware of or focused on. And that attitude has finally begun to change as some of the negative press about people listening to Alexa recordings has come out. We were ready with the feature within 24 hours to give customers the ability to opt out of human annotation. So I think we were the first to be able to offer that. There have been a couple of mix-ups with Alexa recordings where somebody got sent somebody else's recordings. The first foundational thing, and I know people don't always believe this, but we don't want data for data's sake at Amazon.

Now Amazon, the last time it had an event, it opened the event by paying a lot of lip service to how important privacy is. And we want to build privacy into every one of these products because, you know, if you can't trust us to keep your information private, then we know you won't buy our stuff. But then it proceeded, of course, to roll out like 12 new types of devices that can track you in all sorts of new realms of life. Basically, I think the company is at the point where it has realized it has to pay lip service to privacy. And when you listen to Jeff Bezos

talk about this kind of stuff, he says, look, I know there are concerns, but really that's not for us to sort out. The government has to be trusted to use our technology in responsible ways. And one of the quotes that stood out to me is, the last thing you would ever want to do is stop the progress of new technologies.

And it's like, really, is that the last thing you'd ever want to do? I mean, I get that stopping the progress of new technologies isn't the ideal thing, you know, but I feel like there are worse outcomes than that when it comes to surveillance technology. Is this just how every tech giant responds to concerns about privacy? Like, oh, we're going to do our best. It just feels like they just sort of double speak around it.

Yeah, because caring about privacy too much would be bad for business. I don't know how else to say it. I mean, I think they, you know, I think they get that this is a real concern for some people. I think that there is an attitude in Silicon Valley and in Seattle that privacy concerns are overblown by the media, by reporters like me, that we're just trying to scare people for clicks by painting these big brother scenarios that aren't really realistic. I think a part of it is that these are well-off white men, largely, who are in charge of these products, and they don't personally have a lot of fears about technology being misused to target them. It's not a visceral thing for them, the idea that they might be on the wrong end of surveillance, or they might be the person who's suspected of doing something that they didn't do, or that they might have a stalker. I mean, this is a much bigger concern for most

women than men. They might have a stalker who is trying to track their location or, you know, threaten to do them harm. Maybe an ex who's going to hurt them if they can find them. I honestly think that is a big part of why they don't fully get the importance of privacy. Personally, for them, they're like, what's the big deal? I get better targeted ads. That's fine with me. Bringing it back to Enemy of the State for a second, if I may. Please, yes.

That movie, to the best of my recollection, came out in 1998, back when Amazon was still just an online book retailer. And, you know, I got to say, watching it when I was, oh gosh, 13 years old, it felt plausible. It almost felt inevitable. And now we kind of live in that future. And you're telling me that, you know, there's a potential future where Amazon could be helping the government surveil us and that this is already a reality in China with the Uyghurs. How much of this is just waiting until there is a terrible invasion of privacy, that there is a terrible hack that leads to all of our data being misused and Amazon finally saying, oh, our bad.

Yeah, I mean, it seems likely to me that that's where we're headed. But what we're building is something that once it's built, it's going to be really hard to roll back. It makes a lot of sense to me for us to be thinking harder about how we slow it down so that we can keep an eye on what the harms might be before we're in that enemy of the state scenario at some point in the future and we're like, whoops. Will Arimus writes about platforms, privacy, algorithms, and online speech for One Zero. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thanks for listening to our show today, and thank you to KiwiCo for supporting our show today. You can support our show and KiwiCo at kiwico.com slash explain. KiwiCo is offering you, listener, the chance to try them out for one month for absolutely free.

After that, they're going to ask for some money. Don't say I didn't warn you. Okay, bye-bye.