Despite protests from its lawyers, Amazon has been ordered by the courts to produce several million documents.
American plaintiffs have come together to collectively sue the e-commerce giant. In question ? His voice assistant Alexa, which is accused of recording all conversations, even if it has not been activated. The firm is also accused of selling these systems by deceptive means and false advertising.
Is Alexa listening to us?
If the trial will determine the merits of these accusations, it must be recognized that the questions of the plaintiffs are, at least, legitimate. The line of defense of social networks or e-commerce platforms that offer sometimes strangely precise advertising is generally articulated as follows: the systems do not listen to you, they simply collect so much information about your profile and your online behavior that they sometimes deduce your needs without you necessarily looking for them. An explanation that is still worrying for some, and which does not eliminate the suspicion of illegal wiretapping.
Especially since previous years have demonstrated with force and repetition that the American telecommunications giants sometimes maintained more than flexible relations with the law and privacy. The repeated lawsuits against the various social networks and other giants of the sector show that they have an annoying tendency to rush towards the gray zones still not framed by the law, when they do not openly circumvent the latter. What largely maintain the suspicion of the complainants in this trial.
Millions of documents to prove his innocence
To prove that Alexa does not listen to private conversations when it is not requested, the judge who heard this lawsuit ruled in favor of the accusation. The company will therefore have to produce all the documents relating to the marketing of this system, to the complaints received by the company about it and to the technical functioning of Alexa. Amazon’s lawyers have strongly criticized the request, which they find far too large to be able to judge the case in an informed manner: it represents more than 4 million documents to be collected.
Their protests were not enough to convince the judge, for whom ” the plaintiffs’ request may not be perfect, but it is a good faith effort that will get the hands on the really relevant documents “. It’s hard to know how long Jeff Bezos’ company will take to meet this requirement, and the justice system to analyze these documents, but this trial will have an additional round.
Source : Bloomberg Law
11