Amazon keeps pushing the envelope...

[alwaysinasnit]

https://www.rawstory.com/amazon-workers-biometric-consent-fired/

As Big Brothers go, it doesn't get any bigger than Amazon. So there's a furor over the company's recent ultimatum to its contracted drivers: Either agree to surveillance by our new-age technology or find another job.

As Vice reported today, "Amazon delivery drivers nationwide have to sign a "biometric consent" form this week that grants the tech behemoth permission to use AI-powered cameras to access drivers' location, movement, and biometric data.

"If the company's delivery drivers, who number around 75,000 in the United States, refuse to sign these forms, they lose their jobs. The form requires drivers to agree to facial recognition and other biometric data collection within the trucks they drive."

Amazon manufactures the new technology and has battled against efforts privacy-based effort to restrict its use. Five progressive Democratic senators wrote to the company March 3 demanding it respond to the privacy concerns, with a deadline of tomorrow to provide an answer.

snip...

[TwilightZone]

1. Many companies have been doing similar tracking for years.

Of course, it gets more attention when it's Amazon.

[GregariousGroundhog]

6. Indeed

As someone who has worked in IT for a logistics company, I can say that one of the things that seriously interested my former employer was facial recognition technology that could identify when a driver was falling asleep at the wheel and subsequently issue both an alert to both the driver and to dispatch. It wasn't reliable enough to deploy before I left the company, but I imagine it is only a matter of time until that sort of technology becomes standard.

[msongs]

2. amazon is hijacking the postal service to remake it as its own delivery service as well nt

[HipChick]

3. Amazon is rescuing the postal service..

if anything...
Sears, JC Penny etc should have done what Amazon did years ago...

[Joinfortmill]

4. Amazon needs to be reigned in.

[VarryOn]

5. Who among us doesn't want to know exactly where our s**** is....

I'm in transportation, and "tracking and tracing" is top priority. It's no longer acceptable to say 'your load is 8 hours from St. Louis." They want to know their load is at mile marker 17 on I-55. And that's on B2B shipments. As a consumer, I want to see my UPS driver is 37 minutes out from my address....on the Amazon order I made yesterday.

[alwaysinasnit]

7. You have a good point, but why do they need biometrics for that?

[VarryOn]

8. I know I do t want my employer to know every move I make...

But hopefully companies can provide a level of detail that satisfies the customer while protecting the emp who provides the service.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

11. I agree. This is trucking. The company should be able to monitor the driver and load.

I just wish we could do the same level of surveillance with cops.

[Iggo]

18. Me.

I don’t need to know exactly where my package is.

“Out For Delivery” is good enough for me.

And facial recognition has nothing to do with that anyway.

[Tree Lady]

9. Makes me think of my car insurance company Allstate

They said I could save another 15% if I did this app that showed them everywhere I drove, braking, etc. i told the guy no thanks, I don't want big brother watching me drive thank you!

If i get in a accident or ticket they will know good enough and luckily have not in long time either of those.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

10. My brother has that on his cars. What a pain in the ass.

He’s storing one his cars he isn’t using at my place right now.

Drive it he says I don’t mind! I prefer you use it! It’s a two year old suv with only 10k on the odometer.

I got a call the other day “hey you are braking too much and going over 80 mph”

Fuck that! It’s staying parked in my driveway.

[Tree Lady]

14. Exactly why I didn't do it

I drive pretty good but no one is perfect. We get watched enough online ugh!

[Silent3]

13. I don't have one of those insurance apps...

...but my car does have built-in GPS. I assume that, whether I'm actively consulting the GPS or not, that it's probably running all the time, and that there's a "black box" recording of everywhere I go.

It's a bit creepy, but I'm not going to rip out the GPS to stop it.

One thing I thought was interesting is that years ago, when I got my first EZ-Pass (a device for automatically paying tools in various states) it came with a little metalized plastic bag. No one explained the bag to me, but I think the idea was to offer optional privacy -- if you didn't want to be tracked on a particular occasion, you could pop the EZ-Pass into the bag, and it wouldn't get scanned, and you'd just pay your tolls with cash.

Of course most toll booths these days record license plates, so if your plate is spotted, but your EZ-Pass isn't scanned, I wouldn't be surprised if that would be considered a sign of suspicious activity.

At this point I think the only privacy of personal location often possible is to hope that reasonable safeguards are in place to make sure your private location data is only available to the appropriate people via a properly issued warrant -- something I wouldn't be that sure of.

[BGBD]

12. The same people

mad at Amazon being too demanding of their employees today is going to be even more mad in 10 years when most of these jobs are automated.

If you don't like Amazon, don't work for them. Even if you do like them, don't expect to work for them for very long.

[onethatcares]

15. hell, they track their warehouse personnel

to the second, why shouldn't they track their drivers?

Jeff Bezos gotta know where his next billion dollars is coming from.

I think this all started with peeing in a cup but I might be mistaken.

[area51]

16. k&r as many bosses in the US keep trying to push the envelope. n/t

[MineralMan]

17. Well, it's a knotty problem, for sure.

On the other hand, UPS dropped off two packages at my house that should have been delivered to the house across the street. Odd and even street addresses. So, I walked the two packages across the street to my neighbor's house, and she gave me the package that should have been delivered to my house.

My house number is right there by the front door. Someone wasn't paying attention.

Incorrect deliveries can cost companies a good deal of money, actually. So can switching drivers after the delivery truck leaves the distribution center. That's another concern, and people actually do that sometimes for various reasons. For example, a driver making $xx per hour switches drivers to another driver who gets paid less. The original driver then delivers for someone else and pockets part of the Amazon pay along with full pay for the other company. It does happen.

Amazon wants to know where it's delivery trucks are and who is driving them. That makes considerable sense to me.

[alwaysinasnit]

20. I do understand about on-time and correct delivery concerns, but how does requiring biometrics and

facial recognition help with those concerns?

[MineralMan]

21. The only thing it would prevent is the driver swapping I mentioned.

It could also disable a vehicle if someone tried to steal it, I suppose. Biometrics and facial recognition could be used in that way.

I don't know why they're doing this. I just offered some suggestions about possible reasons.

I'm sure they're also using computer algorithms for routing deliveries, as well. We have technology, so we use it, for whatever reason we think it is useful, I suppose.

[alwaysinasnit]

23. Thanks for your response. Amazon is in the business of facial recognition software. Requiring

drivers to submit to it seems like having a captive audience in order to improve the technology and then license it later. Amazon temporarily put a halt on police use of it, but that is about to expire.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/10/874418013/amazon-halts-police-use-of-its-facial-recognition-technology

[MineralMan]

25. Amazon is in every business.

[csziggy]

22. You're lucky it was only across the street!

I'm in a rural location so it is a significant distance - too far and too dangerous to walk - to any of my neighbors. While the regular drivers are good about deliveries, the replacements are haphazard.

Our street address is 7489, the guy across the street and a little north is 7498. The neighbor to the north on the same side of the street is 7589. My packages have ended up at those other houses at various times. Sometimes I get them after I call to check, sometimes not.

Then there is the Google Maps/GPS problem. Our property is a half mile deep. GPS and Google show the street closest to the middle of the property, which a cul de sac with a name that has nothing to do with our street address. They even show the house at the end of the cul de sac as the correct house for our address. Even though I have complained multiple times, whatever algorithm is used continues to change the correction back to the incorrect street and house.

The worst was when materials for our addition were being delivered. One of the concrete trucks went down there, even though they were warned. Since there is a significant slope they spilled concrete on the private subdivision road and had to pay thousands of dollars to clean it up. Another truck got down there and there was not enough room for it to turn around. They had to back uphill a quarter of a mile, then put someone out on our road to stop traffic while they backed out onto the road to get to our place.

Now I tell delivery companies if they use GPS do NOT turn down the road that is not the road on our address but go to the driveway just north of there and that's us. They still get it wrong.

[NurseJackie]

24. Oh brother! Who cares? This is perfectly reasonable.

Amazon should know where their vehicles and packages are located in real time. Amazon should be able to verify that the person at the wheel (and the person handling the packages) is ACTUALLY the person that was hired. Amazon should be able to confirm that the driver isn't driving in a reckless manner. And that the driver isn't goofing off parked all day at a notell-motel... or, when the driver is late, they can confirm that she was indeed stuck in traffic.

I think that MORE DELIVERY COMPANIES and couriers should do the same thing!!

The company who delivers our propane and fuel-oil has the same/similar thing in their trucks. What's the big deal?

They're not implanting chips in their brains or under their skin. What a bunch of hand-wringers!

[Nixie]

26. Well said, and this is nothing new. Amazon is late to the game. Some companies and agencies

use all kinds of driver data, including hard braking incidents to determine a driver's competence. The simplest method of accountability is the company signs on trucks. We called on an aggressive driver with a company sign on his truck a couple years ago along with video he didn't realize I was taking -- turns out this was the second call they had gotten on him and he was suspended for a day. The company called us back and apologized. Sorry, but this just makes sense.

One relative works for a shuttle service that counsels their drivers after speeding and hard braking alerts they trigger. They have a camera on their face the whole day. Oh well, everyone on the road is accountable. Tough if they don't like it.

[MineralMan]

27. Who cares? People who don't do that work and

people who don't hire people to do that work. That's who.

[NurseJackie]

28. Perfect description and analysis.

I guess my follow-up question would be: "Why do those individuals feel so entitled to be poutraged at perfectly reasonable ways that Amazon uses to verify employee honesty, competence, and safety?"

I wonder if it has anything to do with an ongoing hatred of all-things-Amazon?

I certainly agree that there are many things to "hate" Amazon for and a lot of the criticism of them is justified and deserved. But griping about this just makes people look silly... and it weakens any legitimate criticism that they have about Amazon, since that can be easily lumped-in with this and ridiculed to the point that it loses all potency.

[fescuerescue]

29. Bank Tellers have been surveilled for decades

So Amazon about 40 years behind the banks.

Actually there are many jobs that require one to be surveiled constantly. Airline pilots, bank tellers, cops, retail workers, truck drivers.

Actually I'm kinda surprised that Amazon is that far behind.