Amazon’s in-van surveillance footage of delivery drivers is leaking online | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s in-van surveillance footage of delivery drivers is leaking online

theverge.com

36 pointsflutas8 comments

This article references 4 Reddit posts, and for three of them, it seems pretty obvious that the driver themselves were involved in either the pulling of the video from the Amazon van, or were involved in posting the footage online. The only one that is not immediately clear is the dog attack video. The article also says that drivers themselves have the ability to pull video from the van.

It feels like the article is written in a way that assumes the drivers in the videos did not consent and were not aware their videos were being posted online. Skimming the article again, it doesn't seem to mention at all that the Reddit posts appear to be made by Amazon drivers themselves. :/

Bingo, that's the spin. The DSPs can pull footage and every single post has been at a DSP's desk basically...

Without additional context it's hard to determine whether this warrants more than a passing level of concern.

>The July 3rd video appears to have been recorded on a smartphone, which shows in-van surveillance footage being played on a PC monitor in an office that resembles that of an Amazon delivery service partner (DSP)

How is this any different than surveillance cameras that are installed nearly everywhere? I'm sure that for most establishments out there, you could walk into the back office, pull up whatever footage you want, and record with your smartphone. Was there something Amazon that could have done to prevent this? Should they make everyone pinky promise that they wont do it? Should they put the surveillance equipment in a SCIF-like room to prevent leaks? Moreover, how much control does Amazon have in situations like this? DSPs are independently owned and operated. The most they can do is set some sort of policy against this, and maybe mandate anti-leak training. I'm not sure what exactly they can do to proactively prevent incidents like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...

"The camera's AI tracking system" Am I wrong or is that just an old school Haar cascade bounding box?

Consider the following. There is a computer controlled machine gun aiming at you. Somehow it knows that it should not aim at any distractions you try to create. I would call it somewhat intelligent. Of course, I am more intelligent. Using a printer I'm able to fool it into shooting a piece of paper. Unfortunately I did not account for another "intelligent system" of the machine gun, it does not fire more than 5 rounds per face, and I'm out of ink for my printer.

The vans and trucks I drive at work (not Amazon) have had similar driver-facing cameras installed recently - the first time out in one, on the motorway I picked up my travel mug and the screen on the camera flashed/beeped with a generic “coffee cup” image with a red X through it, so yes, these do have some level of AI/ML to determine what you’re doing

Hmm this seems like a class-action suit waiting to happen.

> Amazon claims this information is otherwise protected by “reasonable technical and organizational security measures.”

That's... questionable now, huh?

Who's the class and who are they suing?

If someone at a DSP (which is an Amazon contractor technically) records or otherwise mishandles these videos, how is Amazon legally responsible?

Amazon has some pretty deplorable practices, especially on the delivery side of things. But the law doesn't even recognize Amazon drivers as Amazon employees. IANAL, but you have contractors working for various third parties. And it looks like the third parties (the DSPs) are leaking footage. Doesn't seem likely an individual would have a case against Amazon, much less a court actually certifying a class action.

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