Amazon CEO Andy Jassy takes a dim view of antitrust enforcement

Jassy’s view is that regulators “trust these two large Chinese companies with maps of the inside of U.S. consumers’ homes more than they do Amazon, even though we’ve been an amazing steward of customer data in our retail business.”

“Amazing” is one word for it! After all, Amazon did settle a lawsuit with the FTC about its smart doorbell company Ring to the tune of $5.8 million. The complaint alleged that Ring deceived its customers about their privacy, enacting inadequate safeguards to prevent employees and contractors from getting ahold of customer videos. One employee watched “thousands of video recordings” of “intimate spaces” in female users’ homes, the complaint alleged.

Amazon bought Ring in 2018, and some parts of the FTC’s allegations predate the acquisition. But some of the alleged privacy violations occurred on Amazon’s watch. For instance, “in August 2020, a whistleblower notified Ring that between March 2018 and September 2019, a former employee had provided Ring devices to numerous individuals and then accessed their videos without their knowledge or consent,” according to the complaint. And before 2020, Ring didn’t implement “reasonable safeguards” to prevent hackers from compromising people’s accounts.

Jassy thinks all the FTC action is a shame. “We’re consuming a lot of time and taxpayers’ money with what we’re doing right now and I think a lot of it is outside the bounds of the law,” he says. He seems very sad that he can’t outright buy AI company Anthropic and instead has to merely partner with it. “I think we gotta be careful right now in western countries in the way that we’re handling regulation.”