Amazon: Surveillance as a Service

Abstract

This essay argues that Amazon, the leading e-commerce platform in many parts of the world, uses surveillance not just as a key tool in the platform logic of its growing constellation of businesses but also increasingly as a service to its consumers. In contrast to prevailing assumptions that platforms will obscure the surveillant aspects of their businesses and that users will resist the intrusive nature of corporate surveillance, Amazon’s business practices point to the rapid normalization, and even embrace, of surveillant logics by consumers. Given the importance of consumer data to its operations, Amazon increasingly designs services whose purpose is, at least in part, to collect more data about consumers. The zenith of Amazon’s surveillance capabilities of its customers is no doubt its family of Echo devices enabled by the artificial intelligence interactive-voice service Alexa, which connects to the cloud run by Amazon, itself, through Amazon Web Services. Alexa is similar to competing digital voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant, but with more cultural visibility, worldwide market penetration, and greater integration with a host of Internet-of-Things devices produced by a variety of manufacturers. Amazon seeks to make Alexa an indispensable service to consumers, one that sweetens the granular forms of surveillance in more private spaces and situations that it now has the capability to gather, relative to the company’s more established forms of surveillance. While a typical association with surveillance might be the alienation and disempowerment of social control, I suggest that Amazon’s practices of consumer surveillance cultivate a sense of intimacy, borne of being seen between consumer and brand. In other words, I advocate for recognizing the subjectification of contemporary practices of platform surveillance, in addition to its structural elements.