France fines Amazon €32M for watching staff so much they'd have to 'justify each break' The French privacy watchdog, National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), has fined Amazon France Logistique €32 million ($34.8 million) over a system for monitoring staff activity and performance. The system in question measures employee performance through the use of scanners. Each employee has a scanner that …
Said it before will say it again...
If you need to say something to the public, the more you say it the more untrue it becomes.
Basically every advertisement especially today is bullshit and lies in the literal sense of the word.
By advertising AMZN the very points they are trying to make are acutally the opposite in reality, just like all other ads.
I sincerely pity the poor buggers that work for this lot in the dystopian world they toil in. I'm part of the problem, I buy from Amazon. I try not to now, I try and find the website of an independent supplier of items I need. Their time is coming full circle, where people realise just how crap they actually are now they have literally become a Chinese tat bazaar that you can't trust even when the items are shipped from their own warehouse (thanks to co-mingling of stock).
I hate that I still buy from them and watch Prime video, I don't exactly feel fully comfortable, but they mostly provide what I need at the price I can pay at the time I need it. I think a lot of people are in the same boat and can't completely wean off thanks to the considerable inconvenience it would cause my life. Pretty much like I know driving a car hurts the environment as does me being a rabid meat eater. We can't all give up everything that makes our lives bearable, but thanks to companies like Amazon and their practices we have to live with the micro guilt of our decisions from hundreds of decisions like buying from them.
Cancelled Prime at the beginning of the year due to the last straw of impending adverts being added to Prime Video. I'd used Amazon a fair bit less in 2023 anyway.
Likely to be using ebay as the alternative, I realise that's not perfect either. Problem is, the range of retail or even online stores simply pales in comparison to Amazon or ebay. I tried buying crossover network cables and hard drive bay converters off places such as Scan recently to find they simply don't stock them any more.
The one exception is books. I do love my Kindle, and already have enough physical space taken up by books and other media. I note there's the Kobo UK store, DRM free too, perhaps that will be a viable alternative!
The problem with eBay isn't just that they're as evil as Amazon, but that you have to wade through 6,000 pages of Chinesium priced at £0.01 + shipping that has nothing to do with your search criteria before finding something you might want, which is priced at 25% above the odds, because eBay and Paypal take a 20% cut.
It would be a very brave tech company these days who would try to change the mind of European regulators. Billion-dollar fines have been regularly meted out, and new regulations are coming up fast.
What I meant is that the fine is, all things considered, appropriate for the size of the business and the gravity of the infraction. A small company would have been fined in thousands rather than millions, because it is calculated as a reminder to be careful without actually hurting the business much.
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