'Excessively intrusive' | Amazon fined £27m by data watchdog over employee surveillance

France’s data watchdog has fined Amazon’s French arm more than £27million over what it described as an "excessively intrusive" surveillance system set up to monitor the performance of staff.

The CNIL(Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés), France’s regulatory body overseeing data privacy, dished out the fine, equivalent to 35 million Euros, to Amazon France Logistique, which manages the behemoth’s warehouses in France.

Investigators said indicators tracking the inactivity time of employees' scanners had been put in place, and that such a system was illegal. It also said a system set up to measure the speed at which items were scanned was also "excessive".

"More generally, the CNIL considered it was 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," said the CNIL.