7th October, 2020
European Union lawmakers have sent a letter to Amazon CEO, Jeff Boss asking if he is spying on them through intelligence agents.
The letter was written by Leïla Chaibi, a French politician from the La France Insoumise party, and signed by 36 other legislators of the EU.
In the letter, they asked the tech giant if Amazon’s monitoring intentionally targets trade unionists, Amazon workers, as well as political representatives who could possibly express criticism of its activities?
The letter was sent to the tech giant after Amazon deleted job vacancies for intelligence analysts who speak French and Spanish. The job vacancy also specified that it involves monitoring, threats perceived by Amazon including trade unions and “hostile political leaders.”
2/ On my side, 36 MEPs from across the EU are worried about whether trade unions, as well as local, national or European elected representatives, are concerned by this approach of "monitoring threats", which aims to suppress the collective action and union organization. pic.twitter.com/BVN1yz4nOo
— Leïla Chaibi (@leilachaibi) October 7, 2020
The analyst if hired would be required to gather information on internal and external threats to Amazon and reporting the data to Amazon executives.
However, an Amazon spokesperson said in an interview with CNBC that the job post was not an accurate description of the role. He said there was an error and has since been corrected.
The firm also pointed out that they don’t want staff to spy on third party groups. Rather, the company said it wants analysts to look at publicly available information to understand the environment in which it operates.