The French personal data monitoring body announced Tuesday that it had imposed a fine of 32 million euros (51 million Canadian dollars) on the company that manages Amazon group warehouses in France for using an “excessively intrusive system” in order to monitor the performance and activity of workers.
The National Commission for Informatics and Liberties (CNIL) said the system allowed Amazon France Logistics managers to track employees so closely that it led to multiple violations of strict European Union (EU) rules. ) regarding confidentiality, called the General Data Protection Regulation.
“We strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and we reserve the right to appeal,” responded Amazon.
“Warehouse management systems are industry standards and are necessary to ensure safe, quality and efficient operations and to track inventory storage and package processing on time and according to expectations customers,” added the company.
The watchdog’s investigation focused on Amazon employees’ use of handheld scanners to track packages at different points as they moved through the warehouse, such as when they were being crated or their packaging for delivery.
Amazon uses the system to manage its activities and achieve its performance goals. However, according to the regulator, the system was different from traditional methods of monitoring workers’ activity and put them under “close monitoring” and “continuous pressure”.
The watchdog said the scanner, known as the “stow machine gun,” allows the company to monitor employees down to the “second” because it flags an error if items are scanned too quickly – in less than 1.25 seconds.
The system is used to measure employee productivity as well as “idle periods”.
However, under EU confidentiality rules, the CNIL says it has “deemed illegal the establishment of a system that measures interruptions of activity so precisely and leads to the employee potentially having to justify each break or interruption”.
The CNIL also criticized Amazon for keeping its employee data for too long, saying it did not need the “tiny details of the data” generated by the devices over the last month, because the real-time data and weekly statistics were enough.