2024-01-23T14:51:59+00:00
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/ The French Privacy Protection Authority announced on Tuesday that it had imposed a fine of 32 million euros on Amazon France Logistics, confirming that the reason behind this was the company’s reliance on a system to monitor employees that involved “excessive interference” in their activity.
The penalty is equivalent to about 3 percent of the company’s revenue, a level “almost unprecedented,” France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties told AFP.
The maximum fine a company could incur was 4 percent.
In 2021, Amazon France Logistics’ turnover amounted to 1.135 billion euros, with a net profit of 58.9 million euros.
After four years of investigation and legal analysis, the commission concluded that Amazon France Logistics had put in place “an overly intrusive system to monitor employee activity and performance” in line with the GDPR, using scanners used by warehouse employees to process parcels.
These scanners record inactivity times of more than ten minutes or the rate of processing parcels “to the nearest second,” according to the French commission.
“We strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and reserve the right to appeal,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon France, a subsidiary of the US e-commerce giant, has more than 20,000 permanent employees, some of whom work for Amazon France Logistics, which operates large warehouses including eight distribution centres.
Three indicators recorded by the scanners and transmitted to managers aroused particular interest from the National Commission for Information Technology and Freedoms.
This includes an indicator known as the “machine gun,” which notes when an item is being scanned through the device “too quickly,” in less than 1.25 seconds, and another that measures “idle time,” which indicates when the scanner has been inactive for more than ten minutes.
A third indicator measures the time elapsed “between the moment an employee logs in at the site entrance” and the moment their first package is scanned.
The Authority believes that this system forces employees to justify any interruption, even for “three or four minutes,” to their scanner activity, which constitutes “continuous pressure on them.”
The group has two months to appeal the decision.