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    As Amazon grows, so does its eye on consumers

    AP – From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere.

    And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

    This time, the company is targetting two areas: health care, through its USD3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a USD1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.

    “It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said an Amazon critic Ron Knox who works for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.”

    The Amazon logo in Douai, northern France. PHOTO: AP

    Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38 per cent of the United States (US) e-commerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide.

    Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the US smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

    Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for USD1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime – even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach, which Amazon has attempted to assuage.

    “We treat your palm signature just like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security controls,” the company said on a website that provides information about the technology.

    Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon – along with Google – has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

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