Amazon: Record level of data retrieval by authorities

by Henning Lindhoff

Tomorrow, Tuesday, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the world's largest consumer electronics trade fairs, will again open its doors to industry experts, journalists and sector insiders.
Even before the start, tech giant Amazon caused a stir - in two ways.
On the one hand, he announced new development tools for the language assistant Alexa on January 5th: The Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit is intended to make Alexa's language assistance software available on a whole range of other electronic devices.
On the other hand - and this is to be seen in context - Amazon surprised shortly before the turn of the year, on 29 December with its latest transparency report containing the figures for the first six months of 2017.
Accordingly, the Group handed over a new record amount of customer data to the U. S. government between January and June to meet the demands of the U. S. law enforcement agencies.
In the cloud segment alone, Amazon received 1,936 inquiries from the bureaucracy. This involved subpoenas in 1,618 cases, search warrants in 229 cases and other court orders against Amazon customers in 89 cases.
On average, Amazon responded positively to 42 percent of enquiries and provided data to the authorities.
In addition, 75 inquiries came from abroad. Amazon responded to 2 of these requests - a rate of 2.7 percent.
According to Amazon, there were no orders to remove content from the cloud. However, the company refused to specify to what extent state security authorities were involved in the data retrieval.
On the one hand, it is noticeable that the IT giant clearly distinguishes between inquiries from US authorities and inquiries from foreign institutions. Almost half of all domestic data transfers were approved, while less than 3 percent came from abroad.
On the other hand, it is clear that the transparency report - all the credit that Amazon may earn due to its voluntary nature - does not contain any information about the other business areas. Above all, there is nothing to be read about how Amazon handles the data collected by Echo and Alexa products.
Thanks to the Mobile Accessory Kit, the software Alexa, which listens to almost everything that has been said and sends it to Silicon Valley for analysis and daily support of the listened to, is set to move into an ever-increasing number of products from a wide variety of tech companies thanks to the Mobile Accessory Kit.
The participating companies include names such as Bose and Jabra. Even the household appliance manufacturer Whirlpool is already working on Alexa microwaves, while Samsung even wants to listen in on ovens....
In his book "The Networking of the World: A Look Into Our Future" from 2013, Eric Schmidt, now Executive Chariman of Google's parent Alphabet, writes:"We believe that platforms of modern technology such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are more powerful than most people want to admit. And their power lies in the fact that they can grow and, in particular, expand so quickly. Almost nothing, with the exception of a biological virus, can spread as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as these technology platforms. And this power is also transferred to the people who create, control and use it."