Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

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The original Reuters article[0] about Amazon's lobbying efforts addresses that point. It says:

> Amazon said it wants one national privacy law rather than a “patchwork” of state regulations. Asked for details of any federal privacy legislation it has supported, Amazon did not name a specific bill. The company did provide three examples of what it described as statements of public support by its executives for federal consumer-privacy legislation.

> In those cases, Reuters found, the executives were expressing either direct opposition to such a law, opposition to existing state privacy protections, or advocacy for industry-friendly measures opposed by consumer advocates. No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because members have been deadlocked on the issue.

The article goes into great detail about the efforts to stop state-level legislation. If Amazon truly wanted to see a federal-level law, then we should expect to see them putting a similar sort of effort (or, hell, any effort at all) at the federal level towards getting one written and passed. The simple fact is, we don't.

Until we see that effort from them, anyone using the excuse that, "State laws make this a difficult patchwork to navigate so we want a federal law," is just largely spouting bullshit.

Edit: This is compounded by the fact that, as another user pointed out, they already deal with patchworked state laws in many other areas of their business, but they don't go to these levels to stop that.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-p...

Thank you for sharing the original Reuters article. In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about? But of course Reuters is calling them out on it:

"In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted."

After a lot of insinuations and handwaving about lobbying, the article has this short paragraph about what's actually in the law: "The Virginia law allows technology companies to track consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over privacy violations."

Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.

> So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about?

> The Virginia law allows technology companies to track consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over privacy violations."

> Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted.

Uh, what? Trying to give the benefit of the doubt but it seems disingenuous to call that a privacy bill in a positive sense, unclear what you mean is reasonable about it (though I guess people can disagree on that point), and while I can appreciate strong internal controls that are difficult to codify in law, that seems orthogonal to any of the merits of the "privacy" bill in question.

>In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about?

They are not. What you just highlighted is a privacy bill in the state of Virginia. That is not at the federal level.

>Seems totally reasonable to me.

That's fair, for you. For many others, giving "tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent" is unsettling, as is the fact that those customers would be "prevented ... from suing companies over privacy violations."

>Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.

In your initial comment, you said that, "The lengths that they go to for preserving consumer privacy actually seemed absurd to [you]". Yet the only reason Amazon lets you get a copy of your data and allows you to request it to be deleted is, per the same Reuters article, because the state of California forced their hand on that issue. The article states:

>Under a 2018 California law that passed despite Amazon’s opposition, consumers can access the personal data that technology companies keep on them. After losing that state battle, Amazon last year started allowing all U.S. consumers to access their data.

>Amazon tried but failed to derail the 2018 California law, the first of its kind in the United States, that allowed consumers to request the personal data companies stored on them. The 2018 Amazon document reviewing executive goals discussed plans to oppose the measure, noting concern about its “right to know” provisions for consumers. The 2018 public-policy update said of the proposal: “We strongly prefer no regulation, but if regulation becomes inevitable, we will seek amendment language to narrow any new requirements to the greatest extent possible.”

>The law’s passage was considered a major failure internally, a former Amazon public-policy employee said. An Amazon legal-strategy document written after the bill became law called the measure emblematic of “troubling regulatory and legislative trends” that “caught us by surprise.”

So really, the only reason they "make things difficult for [themselves], just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever" is because they're now legally required to. If they truly went to "absurd" lengths to protect consumer privacy, this obvious option should've been something they offered to consumers beforehand and not something that "caught [them] by surprise", which is a phrase taken from an actual internal Amazon document. Instead, they fought against it and consider the fact that they had to give consumers this option to be a "major failure".

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