Criticizing Amazon May Be a losing battle, but it’s worth it

Ring learns from his parent company, Amazon. It has launched more than a dozen very popular security devices in recent years, dominates the video doorbell market and has drawings on capture the DIY Home Security Market, too much. Yet at Amazon’s hardware event 2021, Ring’s most interesting feature and product deployments seemed to be characterized by, well, reluctance.

Or at least that’s how it might appear: Ring’s new flying drone camera and a virtual security guard function have both entered invite-only launch periods, unlike any major version of Ring before them. But this type of deployment is common for Amazon, explicitly to gauge market interest. When some devices, like the original Echo smart speaker, expand, their production increases rapidly. If they fail to generate excitement, like the Echo Tap or Look, Amazon is quick to remove them from the product line and toss them in the trash.

Here’s an alternate take on the hesitation: Ring, using Amazon’s tools and resources, has several direct lines with consumers – not only to sell its products, but also to determine which products are worth selling. As I have already discussed, and as many US lawmakers are increasingly aware, these resources give Amazon and its brands unprecedented economic power. But it also means that the company can largely bypass the traditional controls of such power – for example, criticism in the media.

That’s not to say we need to stop criticizing the company, especially when it releases a privacy responsibility on wheels like it did with the Astro robot. In fact, it’s all the more important as Amazon tries to break free from any media addiction.

Read more: Ring’s policing problem never went away. Here’s what you still need to know

The power of Amazon

“What may be more remarkable than [Amazon’s] products ”, my colleague Laura Hautala wrote recently, “Is the resiliency of the company’s device sales given its poor reputation among business and technology watchdogs.”

She’s right: Amazon, like any tech giant, seems immune to bad press – quite a feat in a year in which it crushed organizing efforts among one labor sometimes forced to urinate in bottles, hired a former NSA chief, then landed a $ 10 billion NSA contract, faced nearly $ 1 billion in various fines, and has seen many whistleblowers credibly claim that the data of millions of customers is at serious risk.

It’s not that people outside the industry aren’t aware of these reports. In fact, with just one click I can see how many thousands of people have read Laura’s article and many other articles that I have linked above.

It is a question of scale.

Traditionally, developers have needed (and many still need) publications like CNET to share what they are building, and publications, if they do their job well, provide the perspective to understand the product: how it fits. does it really fit into the existing market?

I can write insightfully about smart home products, for example, because I’ve tested almost all of the major ones.

But Amazon is not like small businesses, which often need the audience that popular publications provide to survive. Amazon’s home page is covered with links to learn more and buy the company’s newest gadgets. A little substantive math puts Amazon.com traffic on September 28, the day of its biggest hardware event of the year, in the roughly 100 million visitor stadium. It is more important in order of magnitude than the traffic for CNET’s Amazon Coverage for the day.

A fight worth losing

Amazon understands that it is more important from a business standpoint to be popular than to be good. And it’s awfully good to be popular.

But to paraphrase Machiavelli’s saying: why not be both?

I guess bringing in a mega-corporation like Amazon to show temperance is in vain – the company maintains power precisely because it has been stubbornly intemperate.

Its growth apparently even exceeds its ability to operate safely. According to whistleblowers who came forward earlier this year, for example, hundreds of thousands of old employee accounts still had access to the system after those employees left. And in the context of a device like Astro, which is essentially a mobile camera on wheels, and whose leaked documents indicate that it relies heavily on facial recognition software, such insecurity should be of concern.

“Customer trust is something we have to earn – and work hard to keep – every day,” an Amazon spokesperson told me. “We designed Astro with privacy in mind from the start and built privacy in layers. This includes the use of local processing for Astro’s mobility and computer vision systems, and providing transparency. and the controls in place for customers. “

It seems strange to me, however, that after in the face of criticism for announcing a Ring’s flying drone camera last year, the tech giant’s solution was to remove some of the crucial privacy measures in place in this device (like the camera blocking dock), throw it on wheels and slap a pretty face.

It is a solution through misdirection, in the same way that the invitation-only material event appeases an increasingly marginalized (or blocked) media, or the way self-presentations. congratulations by impeccably groomed presenters distract from the words spoken.

“The question was not to build it,” said Gregg Zehr, president of Lab126 focused on Amazon’s hardware and product innovation, during Astro’s video presentation, “but why not would we not? “

It’s unclear if he intentionally brought up the similar Jurassic Park quote. But the fact that ethics seem such a foreign concept that they are so gleefully (and again, without irony) dismissed is, for lack of a better word, bizarre.

In fact, let me try a few other words: creepy, appalling and, as was the case with much of the sci-fi referenced in the video presentation, dystopian.

Perhaps Amazon’s popularity is a balloon inflating closer and closer to the needle of a security hole. Or maybe an offense will have as little of an impact on its reputation as the fines it continually accumulates.

But this fight – to speak of Amazon’s very real and very worrying trajectory – is worth fighting, even if it loses it.

Read more: Amazon has your future mapped out: are you ready for it?