France fined Amazon 32 million euros for employee snooping
Kyiv • UNN
Amazon's French warehouse division has been fined 32 million euros by France's data protection agency for its "overly intrusive" employee surveillance system
France's data protection agency said Tuesday it has fined Amazon's French warehouse unit 32 million euros ($34.9 million) for an "overly intrusive" surveillance system that monitors staff performance, writes UNN citing France24.
Details
According to CNIL, Amazon France Logistique tracked employees' work, in particular through data from scanners used by employees to process parcels.
The scanners alerted management to inactivity exceeding 10 minutes or the processing of boxes and parcels "down to the second," CNIL said in a statement.
It said that workers were under constant pressure and had to regularly justify absences from work. Even the time between employees entering the warehouse and starting work was monitored.
The agency added that they were not properly informed of the surveillance and the data was kept for 31 days.
The surveillance was deemed a violation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which imposes strict consent rules on companies for the use of personal information.
The fine was equivalent to about three percent of Amazon France Logistique's annual revenue, which reached 1.1 billion euros in 2021 with a net profit of 58.9 million euros.
Several thousand employees were affected, according to the CNIL, which launched an investigation in 2019 after media articles and employee complaints.