France’s national data protection authority (CNIL) has imposed a fine of 32 million euros on Amazon for excessively intrusive monitoring of employees. As the authority announced on Tuesday, it considered it unlawful to introduce a system that meticulously measures interruptions in work and that leads to the employee potentially having to justify every break or interruption. The system used in the warehouses of the world’s largest online retailer in France used a scanner to record how long the interruptions between certain work steps by employees are.
The CNIL also considered it excessive to keep all the data collected by the system and statistics produced for all workers for 31 days. The authority did not question the fact that Amazon’s business activities and high performance targets could fundamentally justify a scanner system. The data protection authority also complained that employees and visitors were inadequately informed about the video surveillance in the camps.
Amazon itself described the CNIL’s conclusions as factually incorrect and reserved the right to appeal, a spokesman said. Warehouse management systems are an industry standard and are necessary to ensure the safety, quality and efficiency of operations and to track the storage of inventories and the processing of packages in a timely manner and in accordance with customer expectations. It was criticized that the authority did not take a look at the processes on site despite being invited. (dpa)