2024-01-23T14:51:59+00:00
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/ The French Privacy Protection Authority announced, on Tuesday, the imposition of a fine of 32 million euros on Amazon France Logistics, stressing that the reason behind this is the company’s reliance on a system to monitor employees that involves “excessive interference” in their activities.
France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties told AFP that the penalty was equivalent to about 3 percent of the company’s revenue, an “almost unprecedented” level.
The maximum fine the company could incur was 4 percent.
In 2021, Amazon France Logistics’ sales volume reached 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” under the GDPR, through scanners used by employees to Warehouses for parcel processing.
These scanners record inactivity times of more than ten minutes or the parcel processing rate “to the nearest second,” according to the French commission.
An Amazon spokesperson responded in a statement, “We strongly disagree with the NCLTRC’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and we reserve the right to appeal.”
Amazon France, a subsidiary of the giant American group in the field of e-commerce, has more than 20,000 permanent employees, some of whom work for Amazon France Logistics, which operates large warehouses, including eight distribution centers.
Three indicators recorded by scanners and transmitted to managers aroused particular interest from the National Commission for Information Technology and Freedoms.
This includes an indicator known as “gun-gun”, which notes when an item is scanned through the device “very quickly”, in less than 1.25 seconds, and another that measures “idle time” which refers to a period of scanner inactivity for more than ten minutes.
A third indicator also measures the elapsed time “between the moment the employee logged in at the site entrance” and the moment his first package was scanned.
The Authority considers that this system prompts employees to justify any interruption, even for “three or four minutes,” of their scanner activity, which constitutes “continuous pressure on them.”
The group has two months to file an appeal against the decision.