Amazon was accused of spying on its junior staff about the shopping habits of celebrities like Kanye West and actors in the Avengers movies. One celebrity bought sex toys at the retailer.
According to reports, thousands of customer service representatives from the company around the globe had free access to any person’s purchasing history.
Former employees claim that although the goal of the system was speeding up services, some staff misused their privileges in order to spy on past and current partners’ buying patterns as well as celebs.
Amazon is accused of giving its junior staff access to the shopping history stars Kanye West (pictured), the Avengers actors, and another celebrity who purchased several Amazon sex toys.
Despite such searches being against Amazon’s rules, a former customer service manager told Wired that ‘everybody did it’.
After an investigation conducted by Wired as well as the Reveal radio station produced by Center for Investigative Reporting (located in California), the revelations became public.
The following are excerpts from interviews conducted with ex-employees.
Unnamed former Amazon employee said that he recalled his coworkers looking at the shopping histories of West rappers and the stars of Marvel Avengers films.
The ex-staff member also discovered that another celebrity had purchased sex toys.
“Unruly vulnerabilities” supposedly allowed employees You can start a “research conversation” with a potential customer to locate them even though they’re not at the line.
Gary Gagnon was Amazon’s previous chief information security officers. He described it as an open-ended system that exposed the US technology company to ‘international threat agents’.
Wired reported that he told Wired there was no system to protect employees access from being misused while working for the company.
Gagnon stated, “It was assembled with bubblegum and tape.”
Amazon stated that it has strict policies regarding access to customer data. They also strongly rejected the idea of common abuse.
MailOnline was told by an Amazon spokesperson that the company has a remarkable track record in protecting customers’ data. They have invested billions to create systems and processes to protect customer data.
“We maintain high standards of privacy and security, and are constantly looking for ways to strengthen them.
“The Wired Story claims are based upon outdated, out-of context information and do not have any bearing on Amazon’s security posture.”
Employees were able to use ‘unruly vulnerabilities’ to launch a “research session” to find a customer, even if they weren’t on the phone.
Amazon workers also claimed in 2017 that they discovered that American Express card numbers and names of as many as 24 million customers were left open on their internal networks for up to two years.
Gagnon stated that the exposure of the data was fixed but it is impossible to know if anyone accessed the information when it was at risk from an attack.
Gagnon stated that he was “astonished” by the fact that the logs of who accessed data were only available for 90 days.
According to a 2018 security memo it was claimed that Amazon staff were prone to store and copy their data in different places, which led to the’mostly unknown proliferation’ of duplicates of their data requirements.
Amazon claimed that there is no evidence suggesting the data were ever shared outside the company’s own internal systems.