Amazon Employee Warns Internal Groups They're Being Monitored For Labor Organizing (vice.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An Amazon Web Services employee emailed a series of internal Amazon listservs and told them that their communications were being monitored for labor organizing efforts and processed in a data farming project by the company's Global Security Operations, according to an internal email obtained by Motherboard. The emails were sent -- at least -- to the employee listservs "Indigenous@amazon.com" and "transgender@amazon.com," and mentioned a handful of other listservs the employee believed were being watched. "If you are a moderator or user of this list, please note that it is being explicitly watched by an internal monitoring team," the Amazon Web Services employee wrote to members of at least two of the listservs. "This is part of a wider project to generate and curate data on internal employees and external entities."
"While we may be under the impression that everything we write at Amazon is at least saved somewhere for review, it is important that those on this list know that they are being explicitly watched and processed in a data farming project from GSO [Global Security Operations]," the employee continued. According to the email, listservs being monitored include black-employee-network@, we-wont-build-it@, transgender@, indigenous@, arabs@, persians@, glamazon@, latinos@, colombianos@, asians-at-amazon@, coronavirusvolunteers@, and dozens of others. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company uses "several methods to gather feedback at scale," which includes "anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums."
"We continually work to improve the Amazon employee experience, and with hundreds of thousands of employees located around the world, we use several methods to gather feedback at scale," the spokesperson said. "The anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums has helped us improve our employee benefits, further strengthen our COVID-19 procedures, and improve the overall Amazon employee experience."
"While we may be under the impression that everything we write at Amazon is at least saved somewhere for review, it is important that those on this list know that they are being explicitly watched and processed in a data farming project from GSO [Global Security Operations]," the employee continued. According to the email, listservs being monitored include black-employee-network@, we-wont-build-it@, transgender@, indigenous@, arabs@, persians@, glamazon@, latinos@, colombianos@, asians-at-amazon@, coronavirusvolunteers@, and dozens of others. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company uses "several methods to gather feedback at scale," which includes "anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums."
"We continually work to improve the Amazon employee experience, and with hundreds of thousands of employees located around the world, we use several methods to gather feedback at scale," the spokesperson said. "The anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums has helped us improve our employee benefits, further strengthen our COVID-19 procedures, and improve the overall Amazon employee experience."
Uh oh, they used the E word. (Score:5, Insightful)
We continually work to improve the Amazon employee experience
When a company like Amazon mentions “experience”, you know they really mean surveillance, violation of privacy, and censorship. They can do what they want on internal message boards of course, but let’s not sugarcoat it with these stupid euphemisms.
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ANYbody with ANY brains should KNOW you don't try to organize ANYthing having to with unions ON A COMPANY HOSTED site.. The fact that the listservs shown all are ".amazon.com".... Morons..
What next? (Score:2, Troll)
And now I suppose you're going to tell me Amazon knows everything I order from Amazon?
I don't mean to spoil a good consipiracy theory (Score:2)
but employee communications are almost always monitored in almost every company - and not just for signs of unionization: usually more like lolcat surfing or porn watching on the job.
Also, there's usually an explicit paragraph about that in the employment contract all the employees signed when they joined. So those who are surprised are either disingenuous, or don't read what they sign.
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Also, there's usually an explicit paragraph about that in the employment contract all the employees signed when they joined.
So? I mean, that doesn't mean it is OK or legit in of itself... for instance there are companies that put into writing (stupidly) that telling your co-workers what you make is a fireable offense, despite this being illegal on the federal level in the U.S since 1934. (Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act).
In this case, I would hope these employees are wary about why they are being monitored, and be aware of their rights in case things hit the fan so to speak.
Indeed, I look at many emails each day (Score:2)
Indeed, they said Global Security Operations is monitoring all of the @amazon.com email. At my company, the security team has pretty good automated monitoring, yet we still have to manually inspect multiple emails per day. Mostly because users still click on UrgentInvoice.exe and just can't wait to help the CEO send a million dollars to Bangladesh for a secret project.
Anything you do on company computers, I can see. Every program you run, I have the unenviable task of making sure it's not malware or PUP,
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https://hub.packtpub.com/wewon... [packtpub.com]
With the detentions and abuses of people in concentration camps by ICE, we are reminded of the role IBM played during the Holocaust
On Monday, a group of Amazon employees sent out an internal email to the We Won’t Build it mailing list, calling on Amazon to stop working with Palantir. Palantir is a data analytics company, founded by Peter Thiel, one of President Trump’s most vocal supporters in Silicon Valley, has a strong association with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
etc.
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I see, thanks. So it's a handy list of employees who don't engage in rational thought.
No kidding! (Score:2)
The company looking to hire in-house Pinkertons monitors its own internal message boards for labor organizing!? I am shocked, SHOCKED!
But seriously, the best way to fix this is to boycott them. At the very least, before you buy a thing on Amazon see if you can order it anywhere else. There is no sane reason for an insanely profitable company owned by the world's richest man to be squeezing its lower-level employees so hard.
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Extremely hard to boycott Amazon when you live in a small town, because all the local shops combined don't even have 1/100th of the choices available on Amazon. Heck I just called the next town over which is ten times bigger and even the specialized store doesn't have what I wanted.
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What you open your browser and it goes only to Amazon and Slashdot? As if there are no other web sites and only small town stores.
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The other websites charge 10 to 30 dollars for shipping, Amazon does not.
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I'm not saying I never shop at other websites, and only an idiot would not compare prices including shipping especially since Amazon is not always the cheaper place even with free shipping. The last thing I bought was four times as expensive on Amazon compared to another website, so even when adding shipping that other place was around 60% cheaper than Amazon.
Should be assumed already (Score:3)
It should be assumed that everything on the company email system is being actively monitored (either by humans or an automated analysis system) for anything that the company might not like. That includes activity that's explicitly legal, like labor organizing. Just because you're allowed to do it doesn't mean the company won't try to shut it down. If you don't want the company to know everything about it, keep it on email systems the company doesn't control and make sure people don't access those systems from work machines.
No, encrypted communications won't work because on a work machine the monitoring software can not only read everything on the network it can literally read your screen in real-time.
Re:Should be assumed already (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon also monitors employee communication on non-Amazon systems.
Inside Amazon’s Secret Program to Spy On Workers’ Private Facebook Groups [vice.com]
Amazon has reportedly been spying on workers' private Facebook groups and tracking their plans to 'strike or protest' [businessinsider.com]
Company Size (Score:2)
This is why you don't work for a company the size of Amazon.
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Definitely they should switch to some google hangout or whatever for this kind of stuff, and preferably access it on their phones. Organizing is legal but you want to steer clear of the 'theft of company resources' angle. IANAL.
Re: Company Size (Score:2)
I am also not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that a company can not prohibit labor organization, even on company property. I would assume this would apply to public forums provided by the companies. It is not like they are demanding paper and ink to print fliers.
No big deal (Score:3)
I wouldn't worry about this, it's not like amazon has a drone with a camera that can fly around autonomously indoors to do surveillance.
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People just like to complain (Score:2)
Of course companies monitor internal communications. If they didn't, you'd have another group of activists screaming how they don't want to see political, religious, sports, food, or other content they consider offensive, on the company mailing lists. If an employee goes postal and they talked about it on company internal mailing lists, how much do you want to bet that people would be screaming that the incident could have been prevented if only the company monitored their own mailing lists.
There will alway
Company Emails being monitored by the company? :-O (Score:2)
all businesses monitor for this (Score:2)
this is nothing new. any employee with any common sense should already know this. business are always monitoring for anything that can hurt their bottom line. amazon is no different.
Slashdot disables anonymous posting? (Score:2)
Or is it just me?
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Every large organization does this (Score:3)
If you thought you were working for an organization that didnâ(TM)t do this because they are progressive you are a fool. Every large organization does this. The ones that donâ(TM)t do it internally outsource it. They all do it.
They all consider unions a threat roughly equivalent to natural disasters. Right down to waking executives out of bed on the weekend.
You can go back to your comfortable worldview of woke organizations now.
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Every large in the USA or many third-world countries organization does this.
There, fixed that for you.
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No, actually, I meant it exactly the way I wrote it. Even in the EU with the 2018 GDPR. You can rest assured that Asia does this. In fact I can't think of any place that doesn't do this outside or places like Iran, North Korea and Syria. I can only presume they have their equivalents that they use.
It's routine to work with corporate counsel to ensure privacy laws are followed. Careful consideration is always taken to comply with privacy laws when working in places such as Germany, Switzerland, Portugal etc.
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In fact I can't think of any place that doesn't do this outside or places like Iran, North Korea and Syria
I can. Immediately and reliably, because I worked at a level and position where this would not have gone down without me knowing about it.
And I don't think my company was so special that they're the only one. This is not just a question of privacy, it's also a question of employee law. I'm 99% sure that my company would have been in court had they done that kind of surveilance of employee communications.
Doesn't mean no monitoring at all happens - there's automated checks for security, and there are procedur
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The security systems that monitor for security and potentially illegal actions are also used to monitor for union activities. I wasn't trolling you - I'm well aware of the privacy hot iron in the EU (I'd like to see more of that in the US).
Unless your actively engaged with insider threat, the SOC or corporate security it's unlikely that you would be familiar with the details, even at the executive level. Companies in Germany are generally much more accepting of unions which could also explain your experienc
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I'm well aware of the privacy hot iron in the EU
It's not just privacy. As I said: There are specific employee protection laws in place in many European countries that make exactly this illegal.
it's unlikely that you would be familiar with the details, even at the executive level.
I don't want to go into detail. Let's just say I had a compliance function and part of it was precisely to ensure that the company follows these laws. I worked with the top-level management directly and yes, I was on first-name basis with almost everyone in the legal department.
I'm also well aware of the legally acceptable anti-union activities. There are still ple
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It would not surprise me if we have possibly worked together somewhere in the past then. By the sounds of it your role is the type of person that I have worked with quite a bit in the past. I have certainly been in a similar position with regards to the legal department. It is the nature of my role under certain situations "let's run it by legal".
I'm not advocating a stance one way or another on unions. I've personally never had any involvement with them one way or another. I'm simply reflecting my experien
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It would not surprise me if we have possibly worked together somewhere in the past then
The world is small. I met a friend from my country at a conference on the other side of the planet many years ago - we were both speakers there. :-)
The funny thing about my role, I'm a strong privacy advocate. I'm often the person bringing in people like yourself. I once architected an RFID monitoring system not to track individuals and got the retailer to accept that this was okay. That one involved a lot of working with privacy to support my position over a period of a few months.
Good companies understand that the best way to make sure you don't break the laws is to have someone checking who actually cares about them, not a lawyer who thinks his job is to whitewash your actions. Very often, there is a perfectly legal and acceptable solution if you spend a bit of brain power finding it, and apply a bit of lateral thinking.
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Wouldn't surprise me if we have a mutual acquaintance who is now out at a well known car company in the EU. I worked with him on the RFID project I mentioned in exactly the way you described. He's an awesome guy that I learned a lot from and enjoyed working with.
There's a lot of proactive work in my field with legal, but privacy as well- many of whom are also attorneys. I'm in complete agreement with you on good companies understanding the best way to stay on the right side of the law proactively. Working w
Don't look behind the curtain! (Score:2)
"Global Security Operations"
Does it look something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But how is it in eu. (Score:2)
So. What. ?. (Score:2)
Their servers, their company, common practice. You'd be delusional to think it didn't happen.
Story in a nutshell.. (Score:2)
Person who doesn't understand that security systems monitor internal traffic, and presents no evidence of a particular theory (which may or may not be correct; most companies have an eye out for employee disruptions in the offing so they can prepare continuity of service where possible) sends declaration of "oh no, you're being spied on, you must jump and react and shout" to company groups that are statistically likely to be politically vocal.
Amazon are not a fluffly company, so I would expect them to have
Racists! (Score:1)
So there's a black-employee-network@ mailing list, but not a white-employee-network@?!??
Amazon needs to be shut down.