Amazon Might Monitor Employees’ Keystrokes To Protect Customer Data

When you run a company, you can’t always trust that your employees will do everything they’re supposed to do. More often than not, employees do things they’re not supposed to do, whether it be more simple kinds of things like taking extended breaks, stealing company stationary, to more serious offenses like looking into databases they’re not supposed to.

It can be hard to keep track of what your employees are doing, but it’s not stopping Amazon from trying. According to a report from Motherboard, they have gotten their hands on an internal Amazon document that apparently reveals that the company is planning some kind of monitoring system for customer service employees.

This monitoring system will be used to look at the keystrokes and mouse clicks that an employee makes during the course of their work. The idea is that by monitoring these activities, they might be able to be more proactive when it comes to detecting if an employee is trying to access or steal Amazon customer data.

Amazon does have a cause for concern because according to the document, they have found four instances where customer data was accessed when it shouldn’t. There is also concern for imposters, where an example scenario was laid out where a customer service employee working from home walks away from their computer, and a friend or roommate then tries to access the database from their computer.

The document also highlights some of the possible legal issues that might come from collecting such data, and as a result, they have opted to use software from BehavioSec that would collect anonymous keyboard data.

In a statement made to Motherboard, Barbara Agrait, a senior PR manager at Amazon said, “Maintaining the security and privacy of customer and employee data is among our highest priorities. While we do not share details on the technologies we use, we continually explore and test new ways to safeguard customer-related data while also respecting the privacy of our employees. And we do this while also remaining compliant with applicable privacy laws and regulations.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Amazon, Privacy