If politics was a game of rock, paper, scissors:<p>What is the counter to Amazon's lobbying?<p>I've done some DIY lobbying myself. Fought city hall, won some (very) minor battles, lost the war. Burned out after a few years.<p>Still foraging for role models, case studies, examples of effective policy organizations. Some kind of playbook.<p>Keep hoping some one, some where has some ideas -- actionable, reproducible, sustainable -- for bottom up organizing to effectively counter the boa constrictor squishing the life force out of civil society.
> One 2018 document reviewing executives’ goals for the prior year listed privacy regulation as a primary target for Carney. One objective: “Change or block US and EU regulation/legislation that would impede growth for Alexa-powered devices”<p>It's one thing to assume that corporations will act in their own self-interests, but this is like they said the quiet part loud. How do you write or even read that document and believe you're acting in a moral or ethical manner?
There was a long article in Wired yesterday about Amazon's retail side privacy failures <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-failed-to-protect-your-data-investigation" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-failed-to-protect-your-da...</a>
So, not to play devil's advocate, and I'm sure they would push against a federal law just as hard, but I can understand a reluctance to allow state specific privacy laws. That sucks, and compliance would be very expensive and complicated.
Business needs barred from politics. Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Separation of business and state.<p>They should not be able to lobby. This amounts to enabling corporations to curtail unionization efforts and other counter productive pursuits with collective public resources...turning the people's will against themselves. Power robbed. It is a fundamental, regressive flaw of our society.<p>If they want to weild political power then they should start a union that negotiates for the workers. The collective will of those workers would influence the political realm with their individual votes. Both in company matters and those of society.<p>I don't trust a secretive group of managers incentivized by short term gain making decisions for all of society. I don't think anyone does, yet here we are.<p>We purport to have a democratic society and then walk into a company that's organized like a bronze age city state and yield most of our freedoms and power to a cadre that does nothing but feed us shit and loot the company while trashing the environment and poisoning people.<p>By all means...keep it up.
Amazon, google, Facebook, telcos<p>The only realistic way to do anything in America is to make something cost money. How about a law saying that the statutory minimum fine for any data leak is $1 per person, for each individual piece of data that is does not have legally mandated collection?
> As executives edited the draft, Herdener summed up a central goal in a margin note: “We want policymakers and press to fear us,” he wrote. He described this desire as a “mantra” that had united department leaders in a Washington strategy session.<p>The chairman of Amazon owns a newspaper and nearly every person mentioned in this story works or has worked for a prominent political party.<p>Obviously there's some standouts and they deserve some accolades:<p>> Cunningham has tried unsuccessfully since 2019 to require companies to get consumer consent before storing or sharing smart-speaker recordings. When Cunningham re-introduced the measure this year, Amazon took a novel lobbying approach: It argued the privacy protections would hurt disabled people.<p>> Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the judiciary committee, was among Amazon’s top-tier VIPs, the 2014 watering-the-flowers document shows. Last month, Grassley co-authored a bill with Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar that would prohibit companies including Amazon from favoring their own products on their e-commerce platforms.<p>then...<p>> Amazon recently has widened its lobbying strategy to focus less on killing or neutering legislation it opposed and more on drafting favorable bills and getting them passed in friendly legislatures, a former public-policy employee said. That tack paid off in a big way this year in Virginia, where Amazon convinced Sen. David Marsden, a business-friendly Democrat, to introduce privacy legislation that the company had drafted.<p>Sounds conspicuously like the mission of ALEC.<p>Anyone defending Amazon's recording collection practices should pay particular attention to this feature:<p>> Some recordings involved conversations between family members using Alexa devices to communicate across different parts of the house. Several recordings captured children apologizing to their parents after being disciplined. Others picked up the children, ages 7, 9 and 12, asking Alexa questions about terms like “pansexual.”<p>You can use Alexa as an intercom. It's recording that too, which does not fit into explanation of why they record regular Alexa prompts.<p>> Florian Schaub, a privacy researcher at the University of Michigan, said businesses are not always transparent about what they’re doing with users’ data. “We have to rely on Amazon doing the right thing,” he said, “rather than being confident the data can’t be misused.”<p>There are no easy answers to privacy. Regulations can only be a first step, because <i>this</i> is the paradigm and I'm not going to argue that it <i>shouldn't</i> be. There has to be something better than these outcomes though.<p>Maybe I'm biased and just see all the darkness woven into this story.
I always say to my out of Europe friends: just state you are from EU in all your app settings, so you get all the benefits of our privacy legislation (GDPR) at no cost!
Arent they worried that if stories like these get out it is going to hurt their brand ? Also whats the point of doing all this if the profit comes from AWS ?
I am already swamped every year in California with annual privacy notices which seem to have to be mailed in paper format.<p>We also seem to have these cookie alert pop-ups in California - also very annoying.<p>Is anyone tired of this stuff rather than enjoying it? We keep on being told this is all to help us.<p>I find these cookie pop-ups stupid and annoying, just require a policy on the site, if I care I can go look.<p>I'd be far FAR more impressed if we actually BANNED these damn things and switched to a basic enforcement model where even 1% of the crap on the net got cleaned up.
Each time I visit Amazon I am now reminded of Bezos' yacht and space trip, which is great because I now tend to look around elsewhere. Geizhals and Idealo are helpful for finding alternative dealerships.<p>Usually Amazon isn't the cheapest anyways.
This is crazy. Bribing is illegal, but lobbying is legal. How many laws are created for the convenience of corporations and select people at the cost of ordinary because of lobbying?<p>Why no one in the US brings up this to the political agenda?
Amazon is a rational company and acts in its own interest. The politicians we elect act in Amazons interest. So we are to fault for this. No hiding the truth. If we to change (a big if) we have to not vote for the corporate politicians. Till then it is just whining and dining.<p>From the article:<p>The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing.
I wonder what would happen if the alexa recordings captured some HIPPA protected medical information that a customer spoke verbally in the privacy of their own home.