Amazon receives a French fine for violating employee privacy

The French privacy regulator CNIL has fined Amazon 32 million euros. The regulator believes that the system that Amazon uses to monitor its employees is too intrusive. According to the CNIL, Amazon is violating several GDPR rules.

According to the CNIL Amazon violates the GDPR law in at least three ways. The company keeps track of how long each employee has not used his or her scanner, for a period of between one and ten minutes. The company also records when a scanner has been idle for more than ten minutes, and Amazon would track how quickly an employee scans a package after the previous package. That should reportedly be no faster than 1.25 seconds after scanning the previous packet. Amazon reportedly also keeps the data for 31 days, which the CNIL believes is too extensive.

The CNIL agrees that Amazon wants to achieve certain objectives and that the company can justify the use of such a monitoring system. However, the French regulator believes that these three above-mentioned parameters are too intrusive. Amazon could continuously monitor its employees during every work stoppage of less or more than 10 minutes, and the company could also record every employee action down to the second. This means that an employee may have to answer for every minor work stoppage, even if it was very short.

Amazon has responded to the fine. The company tells French media that the findings of the French privacy regulator are factually incorrect and that the monitoring systems are necessary to guarantee safety, quality and efficiency within the company.