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Amazon’s Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data

Wired – “Voyeurs. Sabotaged accounts. Backdoor schemes. For years, the retail giant has handled your information less carefully than it handles your packages…According to internal documents reviewed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon’s vast empire of customer data—its metastasizing record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and who’s at your front door—had become so sprawling, fragmented, and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn’t even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders. In the name of speedy customer service, unbridled growth, and rapid-fire “invention on behalf of customers”—in the name of delighting you—Amazon had given broad swathes of its global workforce extraordinary latitude to tap into customer data at will. It was, as former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon calls it, a “free-for-all” of internal access to customer information. And as information security leaders warned, that free-for-all left the company wide open to “internal threat actors” while simultaneously making it inordinately difficult to track where all of Amazon’s data was flowing…”

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