PARIS (AP) — France’s privacy watchdog said Tuesday it fined Amazon’s French warehouse company $32 million ($35 million) for an “excessively intrusive system” to monitor worker functionality and activity.
The French Data Protection Authority, also known by its acronym CNIL, said the system allowed managers at Amazon France Logistique to track employees so closely that it resulted in multiple breaches of the European Union’s stringent privacy rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation.
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“We strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and we reserve the right to file an appeal,” Amazon said. “Warehouse management systems are industry standard and are necessary for ensuring the safety, quality and efficiency of operations and to track the storage of inventory and processing of packages on time and in line with customer expectations.”
The watchdog’s investigation focused on Amazon employees’ use of handheld barcode readers to track packages at other times as they move around the warehouse, such as placing them in boxes or packing them for delivery.
Seattle-based Amazon uses the system to manage its business and meet performance targets, but the regulator said it’s different from traditional methods for monitoring worker activity and puts them under “close surveillance” and “continuous pressure.”
The watchdog said the scanner, known as a “weapon storage device,” allows the company to monitor workers down to the “second,” because they report an error if parts are scanned too temporarily, in less than 1. 25 seconds.
The formula is used to measure painters’ productivity as well as “periods of inactivity,” but under EU privacy rules, “it is illegal to set a formula that would measure paint interruptions with such accuracy, which could require painters to justify any and all pauses or interruptions. “” said the guard dog.
The CNIL also chastised Amazon for keeping employee data for too long, saying it didn’t need “every detail of the data” generated by the scanners from the past month because real-time data and weekly statistics were enough.
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