All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon.
They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement.
If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.
Of all the "problematic" web giants, Amazon is probably the one I have the hardest time avoiding just because the value proposition is a so much better. Sure I can find the same products on other website at a similar price, but it's harder to get my money back if there's a problem shipping times are generally much worse. I have Amazon Smile setup to contribute to the EFF, but I'm sure it probably doesn't really make up for it.
My experiences with Amazon in the last five years have taken such a sharp turn downward I take every reasonable opportunity I can to shop / do business elsewhere.
A huge fear of mine is in 20 years the competitive landscape is so homogeneous that I won’t even have that luxury.
I don't think you need to be too worried about that, young e-commerce competitors still pop up and seem to do well at taking a slice of the market. Shopify is larger than Amazon for my workplace, and Etsy is definitely getting bigger month by month.
I don't know if you're in the US, but I've found that traditional, physical-first retailers (Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond) have all of Amazon's good qualities and none of their bad ones.
You can get 2-day or same-day shipping from them now, and you can return directly to their store. They don't do inventory comingling, so you don't have to worry about things like getting bed bugs from sheets you buy or counterfeits.
You do lose the massive AliExpress-like selection of nonsense-branded Chinese products that Amazon has, but I find that I don't miss those.
Glock did crazy deals early on, letting US police departments trade-in their existing used guns from other makers for new Glocks at minimal or no cost.
Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting.
Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.
When you have a new product, sometimes people need to be given it to figure out how to use it.
A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery.
3M's target audience for post-it notes was offices, so they gave them away to offices.
Amazon's target audience for Ring is homeowners, so they gave them away to... not randomly selected homeowners. It sounds like they specifically gave them to police.
When Ring started this program, they weren't yet owned by Amazon (according to the article, ended it in 2019; they were acquired in 2018, so it did persist for a little while under Amazon)
In most places, restaurants aren't allowed to give them free food. (edit: as a commenter pointed out, may be more of a police policy than a legal one) Yet you'll always see restaurants frequented by cops on-duty - guess which ones are breaking those rules.
Right, I know there are laws preventing law enforcement from accepting gifts. I was skeptical that there are laws preventing businesses from offering them.
Honestly no, other than conversations I've had in various places with people who ran some eating establishments. It may be more of a police department policy, as the other commenter mentioned.
In most places the onus is on the police not to accept free food. It is their professional duty not to take free items. Because it starts to smell a bit like a protection racket, even if originally people offered out of true generosity/thankfulness.
It's a enormous stretch to call it bribery. Amazon isn't asking the police to look the other way. They aren't encouraging anything unethical or a breach of trust. Any more than a free laundry soap sampler in the mail is bribery.
Should the police have regulations about this sort of gift? Should, they probably do, and those that don't should.
Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I've heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.
There is a lot of outright corruption [1] and malfeasance [2] in the surveillance tech acquisition processes. It's probably because that process is so secret. Brandeis was right, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working.
> The Patagonia Pro Program is a membership program for qualified outdoor professionals, environmental grant recipients, and outdoor industry partners.
The forestry service is a very strange example to call out because their employees aren't at all prominent and most well-off consumers will visit national/state parks instead of national forests (which are awesome, but much lower profile) so I doubt many of them ever see forestry service people wearing the gear.
I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy.
Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.
The reason you have tons of crime in places like SF and Seattle is because of department and DA policy not to pursue these types of crimes even when there's evidence. More evidence doesn't make up for lack of political will.
Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right?
There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.
> Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right?
You're being intentionally obtuse.
The person I'm replying to is talking about the rampant petty property crime (see for example the recent walgreens video that's bouncing around the internet) that they decline to prosecute sufficiently even in the most flagrant cases.
But yes, the DA should prosecute cops too because equality under law. And they fail at that more or less nationwide so it doesn't explain why property crime is so much more rampant in places like SF and Seattle than it is in places like Chicago and Cleveland.
They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement.
If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.