French watchdog fines Amazon €32 mln over employee surveillance system

French data protection watchdog, CNIL announced on Tuesday that it had recently fined Amazon France Logistique €32 million ($34.9 million) for setting up what it called “excessively intrusive” system for monitoring employee activity and performance.

The company, which manages Amazon Group‘s large warehouses in France, was also fined for video surveillance without information nor sufficient security, a CNIL statement added. As part of Amazon France Logistique’s activities, each warehouse employee is given a scanner to document the performance of certain tasks assigned to them in real time – storage or removal of an item from the shelves, putting away or packing, etc. Each scan made by employees results in recording of data, which is stored and used to calculate indicators providing information on the quality, productivity and periods of inactivity of each employee.

The CNIL decided to carry out several investigations, following press articles about practices of the company in its warehouses and even receiving several complaints from employees. It considered that the system for monitoring employee activity and performance was excessive, in particular for the following reasons:

• Indicators tracking the inactivity time of employees’ scanners were placed. The CNIL ruled that it was illegal to establish a system measuring work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.
• The CNIL also ruled that the system for measuring the speed at which items were scanned was excessive. Based on the principle that items scanned very quickly raised the risk of error, an indicator measured whether an item had been scanned in less than 1.25 seconds after the previous one.
• More generally, the French watchdog considered excessive to keep all the data collected by the system, as well as the resulting statistical indicators, for all employees and temporary workers, for a period of 31 days.

“The CNIL did not question the fact that the very heavy constraints weighing on Amazon’s business, and the high performance targets that the company has set itself, can justify the scanner system put in place to manage its business. However, it considered that the retention of all this data and the resulting statistical indicators were disproportionate overall.”

As a result, the restricted committee – the CNIL body in charge of issuing sanctions – had made the decision to impose the fine on Amazon France Logistique.

In order to determine the amount of the penalty, the restricted committee took into consideration in particular the fact that the processing of employee data using scanners was different from traditional activity monitoring methods due to the scale on which they were implemented, both by their exhaustiveness and their permanence, and led to very close and detailed monitoring of employees’ work.

“Such systems kept employees under close surveillance for all tasks carried out with scanners and thus put them under continuous pressure. It also took into account the large number of people involved (several thousand) and considered that the constraints imposed on employees through this computer monitoring contributed directly to the company’s economic gains and gave it a competitive advantage over other companies in online sales market.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Amazon sees the conclusions as factually wrong and that it has the right to appeal the decision.