Amazon, Jeff Bezos and collecting data | DW Documentary - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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One day in the not-too-distant future
Nobody ordered this package, but amazon knows Julia's going to need it
Julia's pregnant and
Amazon knew even before she did
could this be possible in the future a
Company that knows us better than we know ourselves
That fulfills our wishes before we've even thought of them will we soon be living in this shiny new Amazon world?
The tuffet one day Amazon trucks will circle people's homes. And if someone needs a diaper, they'll get it in three seconds
I think we can only underestimate how well the system knows us
a
Company with a smile in its logo that provides us with everything we desire but are we delivering?
Ourselves into its hands when it delivers things to us
I'm driven of fear of what it could be if we do not engage
If we give up if we become complacent
That sometime later is dangerous when power can centrally control it and that's Amazon today
We go to the oldest university in England to meet this man
Victim I assume bagging professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford
His special field is data capitalism. How Google Facebook Apple Microsoft and Amazon shaped the world
The Vandal firm in discrete site Alta in the change from the industrial to the data age is a very fundamental one
Greater than the change from an agricultural to an industrial society
Amazon is at the forefront of the radical change to this data age that we're experiencing right now Amazon guns for Neutron
Understand Amazon just take a look at the marketplace Amazon is one of the largest markets in the world
So let's find ourselves a marketplace
Anyone will do
I'm like, let's buyers and sellers meet at the marketplace
You'll find an incredible amount of goods here and may be exactly what you're looking for
a
Traditional market like this has twenty or thirty stalls
And if you Lea buys her apples here, she might find a dozen different varieties, but an online marketplace is completely different
Market place like Amazon is gigantic with millions and millions of different products
In the early days of the internet when many people tried to replicate the market digitally they just tried to offer a lot of products
But that didn't really work out that well
only Amazon's exceeded
about our focus
So what's Amazon's secret? It controls almost half of online trade in the u.s
Its main building is called day one because on your second day at Amazon. You might already be slacking off a bit
Amazon expects its staff to keep working as hard as they did on their first day. That's what amazon boss
Jeff bays once so what are his plans for the future?
We would have liked to have talked to Amazon about it
But Amazon won't allow any interviews no permission to film answers only in writing
So let's get Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa to read them to us
Instead of speculating about the future we prefer to focus on the things that certainly won't change for us
That means that our customers will always want a large selection of products at good prices with fast delivery
If nobody at Amazon is allowed to talk to us, what about former employees
We contact a number of them, but only one is willing to be on camera
My name is andreas vegan. I used to be Amazon's chief scientist
He started the job in 2002
I
Found what sir Unga Bunga van via beanie when I started at Amazon they were less than a thousand people
My office was on the same floor as Jeff Bezos
After every meeting I had with him. I went out more energized than when I went in is who's Jeff is highly intelligent
He's thinking about details and the 10-year plan at the same time yet
That's what I think makes him stand out that's finished if I were smart
When he worked for Jeff Bezos, they were turning an online book shop into a vending machine for everything the everything store
That's why I'm the division from Jeff user that was Jeff Bezos his vision from the very beginning Amazon the one-stop shop
It's all about learning from late is nowadays
recording data costs practically nothing
So deciding in advance what you want to record and then doing it is much more expensive than simply recording everything
you taught as advil is
Simply record everything
We'll put up with things on an online market that we'd never put up with on a normal market
Vindhya if we imagine Amazon doing what it does on a traditional market
Would be like walking around with a little Jeff Bezos behind us always watching what we're looking at
We try on what prices were comparing and what qualities we want and preferences we have
Be writing it all down
Fully and then he would use this information to show us which products best fit our preferences
On see sagging very productive investments again for a little person
Maybe that doesn't really sound so bad letting Jeff Bezos know what we're looking at in his marketplace
But not everyone sees it that way
I'm Catalina. No, khun a data protection activist and author
For the other Schatz to research my book, I give an experiment
I wanted to buy as much as possible from Amazon for one year and find out as much as I could about the company
I
Wanted to know what information about me Amazon was actually storing
And not only when I bought product but also when I just looked at things without buying them
The company took a long time to release the data
Which it's required to do under European law
after some back and forth, they finally sent her a CD I
Found a lot on this CD the last
15,000 clicks from the past year were onyx
And if you were to print out my Amazon data set on paper you'd get about 15,000 pages
But she hadn't actually even bought that many things from Amazon
Just looking at them was enough
click
There were 50 columns for every click
You see not only the second I clicked on something and what kinds of products I'd looked at
But also where I was what telecoms provider I was using and which web page I was coming from
Was either she become boom. She hadn't watched Amazon TV, and she didn't have a lexer at home
But Amazon still compiled a lot of data about her
I'm
Inviting Amazon even knew when I was on vacation because of where the searches were made
Also some people use Amazon Prime as their main streaming service, too
So when you add it all together, it can create a gigantic personality profile that goes into frightening detail about someone seconds to target
Information and information about our customers is an important part of our business
We use data to make shopping at Amazon and our products better and more convenient for our customers with Vemma - ma
Amazon is an easier Amazon is a highly powerful data engine
It's naive to say my data belongs to me
That sounds good. But most people aren't clear about the meaning of that
What's that supposed to mean?
Andreas was a chief scientist at Amazon for only 16 months and that was a decade and a half ago today
He travels the world as a data expert and a walking data machine
Anyone can find out when where and what he's doing at any time?
Hello and greetings from
Lisbon World Financial Center
Here in New York one of the few situations of not being being a smaller
data wall the people
Andreas is in great demand as a speaker. He advises companies around the world on data matters
Fart his reputation as Amazon's former chief scientist always follows him and
Gets him a long way even as far as the German Chancellor
I'm convinced our government can only keep up with developments if we continue to seek external advice and that's exactly what we're doing by asking
Experts from the various fields to health and advise us in the digital council
Andreas is one of them
You will Lake Mead is a--honey because later I consider the things that interest the Chancellor
Former because if I can convince her I can actually achieve more than I could at a university or in research
He shared the good news as soon as he was appointed to the Chancellor's committee
I
Think if you want data to be used sparingly
Then you are picking the wrong balanced design the real battle is to demand more for the data you produce
Remember that seeds of a common foe?
And so he's off to Berlin
But what can we really expect in return for our data
What's Jeff Bezos giving us in return for letting him watch us in?
Chief benefit City Council once Jeff Bezos has collected all this data about what we've been looking at on the market. He starts to evaluate
He wants to use it to learn what preferences influence our surfing behavior
The owner himself has in Hinton's our informations files
technique
Let's market the chief business me reasoning from that unit. So what's he doing with all this information?
He looks at which products are often bought with which other products from their range and then offers them to us
He says people who bought this product also bought that product
Many consumers think this is something really great
So estimate it was tolerance. It was good this
Basic pieces of about Nicky Butler HAP's unsurprisingly 30 percent of Amazon's turnover allegedly comes from these recommendations
The he never son realizes that we humans are much more predictable than we think we are
as being to kill
You Lee is pregnant now. How could Jeff Bezos know that?
The ability to find the right product is not only based on the comparison of a lot of factors but also on identifying patterns
Machines that increasingly learn from data over time can do this much better than humans
And this allows them to pinpoint preferences that we ourselves didn't know we had
Preferences that can change
But that's pure science fiction, isn't it?
Mmm, kinda hype as I can already tell whether someone is pregnant sometimes even before she knows it herself
Small changes in her purchasing behavior Cline in friend Evelyn
In call for help in dementia
Can Amazon really do that? We ask Alexa?
No
No
You don't think so
one time in videos
Companies like Amazon are very interested in finding out when a family has a new baby because this is a point in life
where a lot drastically changes
And whoever manages to put their product there might win a new long-term customer
So how do you know if a customer is pregnant
Ten years ago a large US supermarket chain
Identified buying behaviour patterns from a relatively small data set they even pinpointed the number of weeks
It's been shown that pregnant women changed their consumer behavior, they switched to unscented cosmetic products
They start buying cotton wool pads
And when these customers then go on to buy products
Like baby clothes thus proving that they did have a baby
You can look at what they bought before and say okay people who buy things like that or most likely pregnant
Especially shrug off
the secret lies in the evaluation of so-called Big Data
Autodidactic machines recognize the patterns and Amazon is considered the leader in this field
When we look at which technologies will be important in 10 or 20 years time a large data set is actually the decisive factor
Many retailers think they can't keep up unless they start screening their customers - they want to know how customers tick just as Amazon does
In Seattle Amazon is testing a process that may soon go global
Simply go to a store log in via an app shop
Be monitored and wander out again
3000 of these stores are expected to open next year
at Amazon pickup customers can go and fetch their online purchases and
The treasure truck will take the online offer of the day to individual districts
Amazon bookstores even sell books offline
Amazon also owns the world's largest organic market chain as
Well as its own fleet of aircraft
Amazon already sells insurance and medication operates publishing houses and fashion labels
Payment systems and cloud services and produces its own films and television programs
It penetrates all areas of our lives and collects data in the process
everywhere
It's made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world
Reportedly earning him a hundred million dollars a day as a hobby. He has his own newspaper The Washington Post
His company Blue Origin is aiming to launch tourists into space
He's built a huge mechanical clock inside a mountain that's time to run for 10,000 years
But what does the future really look like with Amazon?
The City of Seattle on the west coast of the US has already had a little taste
I'm also a member of socialist or then live with activist
Jeff Bezos made Seattle his HQ for a reason. He hardly has to pay any taxes here
On the one hand Seattle is booming and you can see this right in front of you this
Bezos spheres the Amazon spheres are a testament to that booming city
But that is only for a few people for the rest of us
Seattle has become an
unaffordable and
unlivable place to live in and the working people who build the
towers they can't afford to live in the same city that they build these buildings any
Years of low wages have also saved the company money one study says that in some regions of the u.s
a third of Amazon employees depend on government food stamps
What we see in the last ten years is an explosion in homelessness
There are regular people who go to work, but their wages are so stagnant and their rents are skyrocketing
So the combination of both of those things is a deadly combination and it ends up making you homeless
Seattle City Council wanted to introduce attacks for large companies the money to be used to build affordable housing
The topic was soon dropped Amazon employs
45,000 people in Seattle
There is no question that Jeff Bezos personally and Amazon as a corporation intervene
They behave like classic bullies in the schoolyard
They said if you have the temerity the guts to pass this small tax on us
We are going to threaten you with a closure of jobs
That was what Jeff Bezos and Amazon did to ensure that this tax did not pass
Instead of paying taxes Amazon hands out bananas free of charge every day to anyone who wants them?
Apparently over five million have already been given away
German cities are also feeling Amazon's influence at least according to people who know about retailing is
the Internet giant
Accelerating the decline of small shops. What does Amazon itself think?
Mr. Mandic, we do not agree. So take a look at the opinion of the well-known and respected industry and cider professor. Dr
Garrett Hyneman from the neater on University of Applied Sciences
needle einen
Yes, let's do that we already have a date with him
My name is Garrett, I'm getting at Hyneman. I manage the University web Research Center, and I'm a retail expert
But the professor doesn't actually say what the company would like to hear on the contrary in fact
It's couture tissue and Fela many small and medium sized towns can still supply our daily needs
But we can no longer really shop there. There's tea giant coffee good. Dr
House Amazon will eventually be the only retailer you can still buy from because there won't be any others left
It's like the enemy on the horizon creeping towards us and we have to mobilize
We can't just shut the window that will just lead to more empty shops
Some small and medium sized cities already have vacancy rates at 40% or more and it continues to rise
That's the consequence when Dustin invited Sudha sisty father
He doesn't even blame Amazon for the disaster. He just says others simply missed the boat when retail changed
Hundred function yet, FIFA local retailing still often functions as it did in the Middle Ages or even in the Stone Age
I'm not son Amazon is reinvented retailing
It's a technical company and most traders don't understand this technology because it's a completely different world how much?
Amazon sets the course and everyone else tries to keep up or catch up
City centers are dying. So does anyone who wants to compete with Amazon have to fight fire with fire?
That's what one company is trying to do here with food order on the internet with Next Day Delivery
The customer can do their complete weekly shopping two or three minutes and we achieved this by cleverly offering certain products if
You buy a certain kind of milk
Then perhaps you'll also by a certain kind of pumpkin and that's what we're trying to do here
Use data to make the customer shopping experience as efficient as possible sensitive data
Quick delivery routes few staff hardly any storage costs. Is this like Amazon light?
We're already developing our first fully automated warehouse
We're much more efficient in delivery, and we can ultimately offer it to the customer free of charge on
The Amazon approach is completely different
It's our duty
There's currently a supply problem in rural areas because of the exodus from those areas
And Amazon won't go there because it's too expensive for their concept
That's exactly what picnic is doing now moving into this niche
Taking on the Giant but only in niche markets
Picnic has some 7,000 customers so far
But what will happen when it becomes much bigger in the past Amazon has simply bought up aspiring competitors
Calm Suns have been seeking dementia at no time in history of markets become so
Concentrated so quickly the spit died a few years
We may face the situation that there is no viable alternative for people to shop online other than with amazon
online and took off miles Amazon
Jeff makes the rules his rules if you don't stick to them you're out Jeff for the nearly easy gimmick
Jeff has enormous power
Which allows him to push down prices and set conditions for traders and producers one few deposits in?
Meeow meeow
State amethyst Amazon is also manufacturing more and more products and selling them under the Amazon name
And Amazon will then take over the market stalls themselves. They'll no longer be any diversity. I
Said it may be some kind of nightmare market
with Jeff Bezos behind every stand
That's it. It's a planned economy with someone in the middle who knows everything and can do everything on Alice can
It's not gone unnoticed
Here for example more and more money is being spent in online trading and Amazon share is growing
And so is Brussels as skepticism?
My name is Emma great Avista, and I'm the commissioner for a competition in the European Commission
It's not the fact that they grow
Because in Europe, you're more than welcome to be successful. The question is of course
What means are they useing is this competition by the book the book or are they cutting corners?
We made a full study of e-commerce in Europe bits and pieces
You know hair dryers electronics all kinds of things that we buy online
and in that we found a number of things but one of the things we also found was a concern about
Amazon and that has been coming back over the last year and now we found that there were grounds
also to do a more specific
Look into how does this work?
Google recently found out what can happen when margarita Vista gets involved
The u.s. Corporation was fined
4.3 billion euros the Commissioner also made Amazon pay a quarter of a billion euros in back taxes
Now she's investigating whether Amazon is using its data power against small online
Merchants, we get very serious
Suspicions that something is wrong then we have access to knock on doors
6:30 in the morning teams come in we can take a copy of your server your laptop your phone
to find your
Digital evidence and then we will try to find a smoking gun
Because of course we have to find the evidence because this is an investigation. It's not gone that far yet
First of all, she sent out questionnaires to merchants who sell their goods through Amazon at the same time. She's also looking at the ever-increasing
Services and goods that Amazon itself offers
Yes, that is concerning because when you are in so many different
Markets, but you have the same customer then one very basic thing is of course how to make sure that data doesn't travel
from one part of the business to the next part of the business
how are you going to make sure that you don't just get the
Amazon offered by Amazon offered by Amazon
In all the markets that Amazon serve and this is why of course we take an interest
The digital Council is meeting for the first time today and Andreas is getting ready to meet the Chancellor
Yeah, let's see what the day brings
Anger Merkel has called on just ten experts to ensure that Germany does not miss the digital connection
There's another familiar face there, too
What every hour before the meeting with mrs. Merkel Victor, what should we say?
I'm great
The meeting in the digital council is strictly confidential, of course
But also on his agenda today
posting a selfie with the Chancellor and his book and
even shooting a video with the late Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
Hello, I'm a dress vegan
and this is the end of the meeting of the first day off the Diggy tired and the ditch advisor board of
Germany we met with Angela Merkel and her cabinet in the morning with some interesting ideas about
The value of tear and others and now we are debriefing and figure out
What shall we do the next time?
Andreas thinks we need better education if we're to live alongside data machines like Amazon
Via Conan Aviva. Fuya. We used to have geography
Botany zoology and so on Kunda, how can we make data a real subject now?
Digital studies to equip us with the basic skills to make decisions in this digital world
He has a different idea
We've got a tackle the problem at its root which is in the information in the incredible amount of data that
Amazon collects and only uses for itself
Amazon has a huge competitive advantage because it keeps the data to itself
the
Only way is to force Amazon to share this precious data with others
this ravine Amazon making some of its data available to competitors small startup companies every day in
an impasse and at that until a few come Stalin was
If we don't do that, we could soon end up in a world without markets
Amazon would be completely unchallenged and why bother choosing things when Amazon's algorithms already know what we want
The song fabric Luke the spezia by a stroke of luck Jeff Bezos has only been trying to sell us products
But the tools Amazon has developed for the market could also be used for completely different purposes
Could use them to aid police work for example, and that's a problem
The police force in Washington County in the u.s. Has recently become an Amazon customer
My name is Jeff Talbot. I'm the deputy at the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon
Amazon has developed new facial recognition software. It's supposed to help catch criminals here in tranquil, Hillsboro
Now more than ever a lot of people have cameras installed at their home security
Stores have more cameras installed that are better quality cameras and because of that we're seeing a lot more crimes
occur that are captured on camera with the suspects on really high quality video when we collect video or photos of
Someone committing a criminal act and we don't know who they are
This woman has filmed a wanted shoplifter so gonna take a photo of it. Yeah. Sure
Okay, you wait right here I'm gonna go check it Mike we're able to take a still image from that video rate
we'll take it to our computers that we all have we have it inside of our police cars put it into the system and
Compare it against our 300,000 or so booking photos
This used to be done manually which took an incredible amount of time then they contacted Amazon
Essentially you just take a whole bunch of pictures that you have run them through a process that creates a mathematical algorithm for each
Picture and that allows you to search it quickly. It's all done on the backend Amazon takes care of all of that, but
essentially, all I had to do was
Index all of those images the mathematical representation of the picture goes to to Amazon servers
But the actual image does not
This system is already working. So well that it can even identify
Identikit sketches with some accuracy. It would be very practical if the police could search not just its own criminal database
But also social media or other databases
We have to abide by the laws. So the law says we can't do it
so our policy says we can't do laws can be changed and so can policies but
That's why we say in our policy that we abide by the law and if the law changes
Then that's the the voice of the people saying they wanted to change
We recognize we have a great deal of power and there is a potential when you have a great deal of power for abuse and
We want to use this technology responsibly. We want to use in a way that the public
appreciates
expects and not
break that trust me as a
Private citizen I have those same concerns that they have
But now thanks to Amazon the police saves a lot of time
It cost us only a couple hundred US dollars
To deploy and initially develop and upload our booking photo database and our monthly bill to use the software is right around 12
Dollars so for $12 a month if we can solve gosh even one crime a month for that
It is a financial win for us. What if you could also troll social networks in the same way?
We had a female. We only knew her first name that she had a warrant and we knew her profile on Facebook
Which was not her real name. We ever will take her facebook video that she had posted on her profile
Take a still image from that video run it through recognition and find out her true identity her first name match
She had a warrant we later went to her house and rested her
We have been very impressed with the technology and
Some photos that might seem like they're grainy or don't have a lot of quality to them how it can still find those
Facial features and match them to people that have been our custody before
Many people on the other hand believe the temptation to abuse. The new technology will be too big to resist
I'm Jake snow and technology and civil abuse attorney at the ACLU of Northern, California
The ACLU is the largest civil rights organization in the u.s
Well surveillance technology is often deployed
first in places where
there's a plausible public safety justification and where it's convenient for people and then it's expanded to
Encompass more and more and more of monitoring people's daily lives
It's important to stop the technology as it is beginning to be deployed
And think carefully about whether those public safety justifications are really valid
Amazon's facial recognition allows police to monitor the entire public space
This is already being done in other parts of the US, too
But the police there aren't as open as they are in Washington County and won't talk to us
Well Amazon runs a large
Cloud service, and they're providing that cloud service to governments and they're also providing surveillance technology to governments
And so you know what is concerning about that partnership?
Is that the information that that companies gather?
Could be combined with information that governments gather and the power and quite honestly the ability to control
society
Could become truly profound and really disturbing
Let's hear Amazon's opinion on stationery use as a technology solution
Amazon recognition already has many useful applications in the real world view book
We continue to look forward to seeing how image and video analysis can contribute to the common good
including in the public sector and law enforcement
by Tonkin
Are any of these protestors wanted by the police
Amazon could filter this out in real-time and also keep a record of who was at the demonstration today
I want a society where I can move freely and participate in demonstrations without being registered anywhere in Oakland was here today
english
It's completely impossible to go through inner cities without being filmed by at least ten cameras
If you link facial recognition systems from Amazon or another company with all the surveillance cameras there
You'd get comprehensive surveillance of the public space
You can't say what other systems will be linked into it in the future
If our behavior is being watched and the things we buy online are being watched
What sort of dangers or problems does that really pose for us?
In the field of data protection
The Amazon ization of the world means that I can no longer find a refuge where a company isn't finding out about me
This data could also be used to manipulate me at some point
because anyone who knows my concerns are my fears can also very easily find out how to make me buy something or perhaps even
vote for someone
a
Professor at Harvard Business School has even given this phenomenon a name
My name is Shoshana Zubov, and I'm the author of the age of surveillance capitalism
Her book on surveillance capitalism also includes Alexa
Last year Amazon applied for a patent on software to help Alexa to recognize not only what we say
but also how we feel I
Happen to have a little model of Alexa right here, so you asked me if I would have an Alexa in my home
The answer is my home is my sanctuary
using this
conversational interface for their supply chains for behavioral data now for Amazon, for example
The ambition is limitless because it wants to saturate our homes
it wants to saturate every
environment where we live to make it as pervasive as possible because the supply of that voice is
priceless
She believes the omnipresent Alexa is just a harbinger of a completely new form of capitalism
One where we think we are just customers but in reality are most of all suppliers of raw materials
Which means we are paying twice over
Surveillance capitalism is a rogue capitalism a
mutation of capitalism based on
Extraction of private experience for others profit others knowledge and power
the economic imperatives that drive surveillance capitalism force it into the production of
vast
asymmetries
unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and
therefore the asymmetries of power that follows from vast
private knowledge
Surveillance capitalism is a profound threat to democracy. In fact, I call it a coup from above a
market-based cool from above
Will there be a day when Jeff Bezos knows us better than we know ourselves and also better than all our elected
politicians put together
What comes then?
Feli
Is a sewer that's here
Maybe we'd be better off without democracy namely the sphere advanced to Amazon
We could just go to Amazon and Facebook and Google and say
Dear, mr. Basis
Mr. Zuckerberg
Evaced, you know exactly what I want
I show you that every day. Can't you just appoint the government for me?
Me see the potentials. Yeah, cause I see potentially huge problems ahead
Could even lead us to question our own free will
But we can't help but turn to Amazon because we believe that we can only be happy there
Yelp inclusive it
When a single company knows what groceries will need next week when it produces all the products we like
When it alone knows what musically enjoy and when the heroes on their pedestals provide
Parcels instead of freedom will we then be in the new age of Amazon?
We will pay a price for this future the price we pay
Will be in our freedom and in our social bonds and in the very possibility of our democracy
I would not really like to live in a in a world where it was just one company
Providing the wake-up call and the toothpaste and the milk in the fridge
Because I think that the the risks are too high and I have I have a sense of privacy that is
For me a biggest thing that convenience
Good morning, Yulia today is an important date for you
You're in your 16th week of pregnancy and have a gynecological appointment at 9:30 at the Amazon health care clinic. I
Refilled the milk in the fridge for use with HD which include song feeder Alka food
Of course Yulia wants to know if it will be a boy or a girl come on you earlier
It's blue you can see for yourself
No, they can't do all that yet, but perhaps one day in a not too distant future
You