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The cartoon playing out in the media once again reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia because I used to work at Alexa. The lengths that they go to for preserving cons

The cartoon playing out in the media once again reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia because I used to work at Alexa. The lengths that they go to for preserving consumer privacy actually seemed absurd to me. Alexa engineers and applied scientists' lives would have been much easier if they didn't take customer privacy -- and their right to request and delete their data -- so seriously. Yes, they are lobbying against regulation. But that's because no business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50 states. They're saying let's have one federal regulation so it's easier to comply. It's not that they don't care about privacy -- they very much do. In fact, all these large companies want regulation because it strengthens their moat. A startup won't have the resources to comply with such regulations on Day 1. They just want it to be reasonable because dealing with different state-level regulations is too much.

sitkack 5y ago
How about we regulate AND make it easy for startups to compete. Living in world where the big corps can all responsibly handle your data (what ever that actually means) and competition stagnates. Our brand of capitalism pretends in runs on competition. *edit and from the article, if Amazon is quietly curtailing and preventing privacy laws on a state basis, what effort are they using ton unify those laws on a federal basis? > No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because members have been deadlocked on the issue. I assume Amazon is assisting here as well. All large corporations have a lot of folks at the edges actually doing the work. The internal controls for privacy are strong, but those are nearly orthogonal to the larger corporate goals. If you leak or improperly use customer data, that could have huge ramifications from the political and legal fall out. The amoral or immoral use of customer data at the whole org level are what people are generally talking about when it comes to data privacy from corporations.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  The laws are written to entrench incumbents and their moats. Startups have neither the resources or the lobbyists to compete while they try to get their bare feeble MVP off the ground. The only way you can do that is if you carve out exemptions for smaller companies. This law does not apply if you have less than 300 employees and 100 million is net turnover etc.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    this cynical post misses the fact that corporate executives also decry invasions of privacy when it hits they themselves, their dear ones and their inner circles. You can bet that there is privacy available, but how, from whom, under what terms, and of course how much money does it cost.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    How about we make privacy laws that are easy for everyone to comply with. No moats, no exemptions. We need strong personal privacy and the peeping tom corporations can offer value other than attempting to hack our wetware for profit.
reaperducer 5y ago
no business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50 states. Amazon already does this in a thousand ways, from labor laws to labeling laws to paying thousands of different sales tax rates to thousands of different states, towns, and other municipalities. If this was a startup, maybe you'd have a case. But it's a trillion-dollar company. Suck it up, buttercup. Or just do the simple thing: Follow the most restrictive state laws. Somehow, following California emissions standards in the 1970's didn't bankrupt the auto industry. And following Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture standards didn't bankrupt the food industry in the early part of the last century. Following the rules is a cost of doing business. If Amazon can't afford to follow the rules, then it should go out of business and let someone else innovate.
- bllguo 5y ago
  not wanting to deal with 50 sets of different rules is eminently reasonable. They have the resources to manage, so no improvement is necessary? Is that really the argument here?
- tatersolid 5y ago
  > suck it up Congratulations. Now we can have no new start ups that compete with Amazon, because the regulatory burden is too high. Also, you can’t make privacy laws that only apply to large corporations. Why should a smaller company get to pass on privacy laws when Amazon doesn’t? That violates 14th amendment of the constitution.
jjulius 5y ago
The original Reuters article[0] about Amazon's lobbying efforts addresses that point. It says: > Amazon said it wants one national privacy law rather than a “patchwork” of state regulations. Asked for details of any federal privacy legislation it has supported, Amazon did not name a specific bill. The company did provide three examples of what it described as statements of public support by its executives for federal consumer-privacy legislation. > In those cases, Reuters found, the executives were expressing either direct opposition to such a law, opposition to existing state privacy protections, or advocacy for industry-friendly measures opposed by consumer advocates. No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because members have been deadlocked on the issue. The article goes into great detail about the efforts to stop state-level legislation. If Amazon truly wanted to see a federal-level law, then we should expect to see them putting a similar sort of effort (or, hell, any effort at all) at the federal level towards getting one written and passed. The simple fact is, we don't. Until we see that effort from them, anyone using the excuse that, "State laws make this a difficult patchwork to navigate so we want a federal law," is just largely spouting bullshit. Edit: This is compounded by the fact that, as another user pointed out, they already deal with patchworked state laws in many other areas of their business, but they don't go to these levels to stop that. [0]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-privacy-lobbying https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-p...
- putlake 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing the original Reuters article. In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about? But of course Reuters is calling them out on it: "In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted." After a lot of insinuations and handwaving about lobbying, the article has this short paragraph about what's actually in the law: "The Virginia law allows technology companies to track consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over privacy violations." Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.
jimkleiber 5y ago
I was just having a conversation yesterday about how complex it can be to follow 50 different state regulations, but also 200+ different national regulations. Would the ideal case for you to be a federal (national) regulation or a global regulation?
VRay 5y ago
And yet you're collecting insane amounts of data with little or no way to opt out of it, and storing that data in a country where the secret police can rifle through it any time with effectively no oversight.
- putlake 5y ago
  You can ask to see the data Amazon has on you, and for it to be deleted. If you ask for it to be deleted, they will delete it all. And you can keep asking every month if you like. Not to mention no one is forcing you to use Alexa in the first place.

sitkack 5y ago

How about we regulate AND make it easy for startups to compete. Living in world where the big corps can all responsibly handle your data (what ever that actually means) and competition stagnates. Our brand of capitalism pretends in runs on competition. *edit and from the article, if Amazon is quietly curtailing and preventing privacy laws on a state basis, what effort are they using ton unify those laws on a federal basis? > No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because members have been deadlocked on the issue. I assume Amazon is assisting here as well. All large corporations have a lot of folks at the edges actually doing the work. The internal controls for privacy are strong, but those are nearly orthogonal to the larger corporate goals. If you leak or improperly use customer data, that could have huge ramifications from the political and legal fall out. The amoral or immoral use of customer data at the whole org level are what people are generally talking about when it comes to data privacy from corporations.

1cvmask 5y ago
The laws are written to entrench incumbents and their moats. Startups have neither the resources or the lobbyists to compete while they try to get their bare feeble MVP off the ground. The only way you can do that is if you carve out exemptions for smaller companies. This law does not apply if you have less than 300 employees and 100 million is net turnover etc.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  this cynical post misses the fact that corporate executives also decry invasions of privacy when it hits they themselves, their dear ones and their inner circles. You can bet that there is privacy available, but how, from whom, under what terms, and of course how much money does it cost.
- sitkack 5y ago
  How about we make privacy laws that are easy for everyone to comply with. No moats, no exemptions. We need strong personal privacy and the peeping tom corporations can offer value other than attempting to hack our wetware for profit.

reaperducer 5y ago

no business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50 states. Amazon already does this in a thousand ways, from labor laws to labeling laws to paying thousands of different sales tax rates to thousands of different states, towns, and other municipalities. If this was a startup, maybe you'd have a case. But it's a trillion-dollar company. Suck it up, buttercup. Or just do the simple thing: Follow the most restrictive state laws. Somehow, following California emissions standards in the 1970's didn't bankrupt the auto industry. And following Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture standards didn't bankrupt the food industry in the early part of the last century. Following the rules is a cost of doing business. If Amazon can't afford to follow the rules, then it should go out of business and let someone else innovate.

bllguo 5y ago
not wanting to deal with 50 sets of different rules is eminently reasonable. They have the resources to manage, so no improvement is necessary? Is that really the argument here?
tatersolid 5y ago
> suck it up Congratulations. Now we can have no new start ups that compete with Amazon, because the regulatory burden is too high. Also, you can’t make privacy laws that only apply to large corporations. Why should a smaller company get to pass on privacy laws when Amazon doesn’t? That violates 14th amendment of the constitution.

jjulius 5y ago

The original Reuters article[0] about Amazon's lobbying efforts addresses that point. It says: > Amazon said it wants one national privacy law rather than a “patchwork” of state regulations. Asked for details of any federal privacy legislation it has supported, Amazon did not name a specific bill. The company did provide three examples of what it described as statements of public support by its executives for federal consumer-privacy legislation. > In those cases, Reuters found, the executives were expressing either direct opposition to such a law, opposition to existing state privacy protections, or advocacy for industry-friendly measures opposed by consumer advocates. No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because members have been deadlocked on the issue. The article goes into great detail about the efforts to stop state-level legislation. If Amazon truly wanted to see a federal-level law, then we should expect to see them putting a similar sort of effort (or, hell, any effort at all) at the federal level towards getting one written and passed. The simple fact is, we don't. Until we see that effort from them, anyone using the excuse that, "State laws make this a difficult patchwork to navigate so we want a federal law," is just largely spouting bullshit. Edit: This is compounded by the fact that, as another user pointed out, they already deal with patchworked state laws in many other areas of their business, but they don't go to these levels to stop that. [0]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-privacy-lobbying https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-p...

putlake 5y ago
Thank you for sharing the original Reuters article. In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about? But of course Reuters is calling them out on it: "In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted." After a lot of insinuations and handwaving about lobbying, the article has this short paragraph about what's actually in the law: "The Virginia law allows technology companies to track consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over privacy violations." Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.

jimkleiber 5y ago

I was just having a conversation yesterday about how complex it can be to follow 50 different state regulations, but also 200+ different national regulations. Would the ideal case for you to be a federal (national) regulation or a global regulation?

VRay 5y ago

And yet you're collecting insane amounts of data with little or no way to opt out of it, and storing that data in a country where the secret police can rifle through it any time with effectively no oversight.

putlake 5y ago
You can ask to see the data Amazon has on you, and for it to be deleted. If you ask for it to be deleted, they will delete it all. And you can keep asking every month if you like. Not to mention no one is forcing you to use Alexa in the first place.