Why do people have so much faith in Amazon? It probably has a lot to do with the way the retail colossus—which consistently ranks among the most trusted institutions on earth—offers you a world's worth of consumer goods, and then delivers exactly what you want, exactly where and when you want it. It offers precision-guided gratification. But in exchange, Amazon also takes something from you: your data. The company feasts on its burgeoning record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and what your Ring camera shows on your front stoop. And it is far, far less precise in how it corrals and controls that data than it is in how swiftly it delivers the right electric toothbrush to your door. As one former Amazon director of information security puts it, for years inside of Amazon there was a "free-for-all" of internal access to customer information. And according to a collaborative investigation by WIRED and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, that free-for-all left all that customer information wide open to a host of security threats—many of them coming from inside Amazon's mammoth workforce itself. Pulitzer Prize finalist Will Evans' story is laced with so many explosive revelations it's hard to keep count. But once you've read it, you may want to reconsider how much you trust Amazon. John Gravois | Senior Editor, WIRED |
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