France’s data protection authorities punished Amazon’s French warehouse management business € 32 million (US $ 34.9 million) on Tuesday for using an “excessively intrusive” monitoring system to check employee performance.
According to the agency known by its initials CNIL, Amazon France Logistique tracked employee performance using data from scanners used by personnel to process deliveries. The CNIL claimed in a statement that scanners captured times of idleness exceeding 10 minutes or the handling of packages and deliveries “right up to the second”.
The “stow machine gun” was another surveillance tool ruled undesirable by CNIL, which noted whether an item had been examined “too fast” or in less than 1.25 seconds.
According to the report, employees were always under stress and had to justify their absences on a daily basis. Even the time between the employees’ arrival at the warehouse and the start of work was tracked.
It stated that they were not sufficiently told about the surveillance, and the data was held for 31 days.
The penalties amounted to almost three percent of Amazon France Logistique’s total revenue.
An Amazon representative said the business denied the conclusions as “factually incorrect and we reserve the right to appeal,” adding that such measures were required “to ensure security, quality, and efficiency.”
The system affected several thousand employees, according to CNIL. In 2019, the agency began an investigation in response to media reports and labor concerns.(AFP)
