Tag: lina
Rights Groups To FTC’s Lina Khan: Please Kill Amazon’s iRobot Acquisition
That “consumer data” refers to detailed video footage of customers’ homes and floor plans constantly sucked up by iRobot’s Roomba and other home devices. That type of data is potentially well worth the $1.7 billion Amazon intends to spend on the company if for nothing else than to determine more useful shit to sell you through its main business. Privacy advocates, however, fear Amazon — which already has smart devices hooked up in around a third of U.S. households — could potentially misuse that potentially sensitive data. Critics, including some U.S. senators, warn we’ve already witnessed a version of this through Amazon-owned Ring sharing user data with police without its owners’ consent or a police warrant.
“There is no more private space than the home,” the letter reads. “Yet with this acquisition, Amazon stands to gain access to extremely intimate facts about our most private spaces that are not available through other means, or to other competitors.” While Amazon’s recent acquisition attempt is significant, the groups warn Amazon’s iRobot deal amounts to a symptom of a larger problem. “Amazon’s business model largely relies on acquiring rivals, sometimes in adjacent markets, and then rapidly expanding through anti-competitive predatory pricing while leveraging vast troves of consumer data to grow its overall grip on the economy,â the letter reads. To bolster that point, the groups pointed to Amazon’s 2018 acquisition of smart doorbell maker Ring. Within three years, Ring transformed from a successful but growing product to the undisputed king of smart doorbells. That sudden market annihilation, the groups argue, was only made possible through Amazon pushing the product through its “ubiquitous” e-commerce platform at below market price points.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.