Jeff Bezos

The retail giant expanded its Amazon One biometric business at brick-and-mortar locations, rolling out palm-scan payment at Whole Foods and offering it for identification at hospitals, event venues, and more. In 2020, Amazon One contactless entry, and then payment features, were launched at Amazon Go stores—which prompted a class-action lawsuit in the Southern District of New York over the biometric information the stores were collecting. A class-action complaint in Illinois, similarly, raised the “Just Walk Out” sensor and camera technology’s “unparalleled privacy concerns,” and its potential to sell customer data to other retailers. Still, as recently as last year, Amazon One was behind the check-in system at hundreds of NYU Langone health care centers. While an Amazon spokesperson told Vox that users’ One data is kept separate from their Amazon.com profiles, Amazon Web Services’ terms allow it to share user data with advertisers. The company stands accused in a years-long court case of hoovering up biometric data for Amazon Photos users, including non-consenting minors. But customers weren’t as enthused about paying with their palm prints or being identified by biometrics: Amazon One for retail and health care settings is set to shut down mid-2026.

Amazon was also set to supercharge its surveillance network through its Ring cameras, acquired in 2018 for $1 billion. Last year, Ring announced it would integrate with the company Flock Safety, which provides AI-powered cameras and license-plate readers to law enforcement—as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and many other agencies. The plans were canceled, after a backlash from a Super Bowl ad that illustrated how Ring’s cameras would enable governments to track anyone’s movements, but Ring’s everyday operations present plenty of privacy problems on their own. In recent years, Ring and Alexa settled with the Federal Trade Commission over lax privacy enforcement, including government allegations that Amazon improperly kept recordings of kids’ voices. The FTC found that employees could spy on customers through Ring cameras, and that devices were hacked to proposition children and teens or stream live video. Despite the series of lawsuits and regulatory actions, Ring is introducing more AI features like facial recognition—raising fresh rounds of civil liberties concerns over biometric identification from its widespread cameras. Ring and other product data could potentially feed into behavior prediction and other AI identification systems, and be linked to Amazon’s reams of consumer data.

For years, Amazon has faced waves of revelations over how its home assistant Alexa was, unbeknownst to its owners, recording their private conversations. Privacy breaches reported in 2018 offered the first indications that Alexa could transfer recordings made inside users’ homes, such as when a man in Germany who had never used Alexa received an email containing voice recordings of a stranger. The floodgates opened in 2019, when a Bloomberg story revealed that thousands of Alexa workers around the world were being sent recordings from the devices to categorize speech, information that included the user’s account number, first name, and device serial number. That same year, a New York Times consumer-advice column warned readers bluntly that “Alexa Never Stops Listening to You,” potentially recording any conversation and “presumably” using the information to chase you with more marketing. By 2025, Amazon removed the option not to send voice recordings to Amazon—a little-used privacy setting—from its Echo speakers, ensuring that all Alexa recordings funnel into generative AI in the cloud.

Amazon is jamming AI-powered chatbots, Health AI, into the healthcare services available to all U.S. Amazon customers. When Bezos’ company announced in 2022 it was acquiring the primary care provider One Medical for around $3.9 billion in cash, regulators—like those at the Federal Trade Commission—sounded warnings about combining sensitive health information with Amazon’s trove of consumer data. Besides further targeting products to customers based on their medical needs and histories, the merger gave Amazon even greater ability to deploy its massive size advantage in the health care sector. It wasn’t long before nine employees at  Amazon One Medical improperly accessed the records of a dead patient whose family had filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the company. With access to your medical records, shopping history, search data, and your Amazon account, the company’s AI now has the info it needs to predict your health future—and as much as Amazon says that Health AI only uses “abstracted patterns without directly identifying information,” the company’s surveillance practices speak for themselves.

Billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos dreams of escaping Earth—but his sci-fi vision of space colonies powered by dick rockets presents a brutal contrast with the top-down control that Amazon exerts over its own workers. Bezos’ gigantic wealth, bankrolling his space company Blue Origin and toys like a $500 million superyacht, stems from Amazon’s surveillance-drenched business culture. The company has been exposed using secret market-manipulating algorithms, as detailed in federal antitrust cases, and his companies’ intensive customer tracking and data collection practices push the boundaries of privacy. While Bezos talks up a future of trillions of people gallivanting between space stations, his unchecked operations here on this planet serve to expand his corporate empire and pad his fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Just recently, Amazon announced an unprecedented push into artificial intelligence, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to investments in data centers and satellites, on top of its partnerships with AI companies like Anthropic—putting Bezos in position to expand his ruthless surveillance regime in untold ways.

Bezos’ control begins in his own company. Amazon’s surveillance infrastructure sets the pace for corporate America, using AI-powered cameras, productivity tracking, and algorithmic discipline to monitor warehouse employees and delivery drivers down to the second. Last year, a labor expert told CNBC that Amazon has “perfected the weaponization” of technology, spying on workers, and managing by algorithm during anti-union campaigns, “more than any other company.”

“We have an injury crisis and we’re being watched and you feel like you’re in prison,” said one Amazon warehouse worker in Missouri, who participated in filing unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). “They know every move you make, when you’re working, when you’re not working,” she said. “They surveil you with their cameras. Managers surveil you with their laptops because they can pull up your profile and a bar changes a certain color when you’re not active.” The company’s obsessive pursuit of speed at all costs has resulted in injury rates 71% higher than other employers in the warehouse sector, according to analysis of injury reports with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

In one particularly gruesome incident in March, 2026, workers claim they were forced to continue working around the body of a colleague who died on the floor of an Amazon warehouse in Oregon.

Under the relentless productivity pressure, Amazon workers have resorted to having to pee in bottles—not just delivery drivers, but warehouse workers, too, who can face a 10-minute walk to the bathroom on a 15-minute break. Amazon even had to apologize for pushing back against reports of workers stashing pee bottles as their every minute is tracked. Amazon’s long track record of union-busting and violating federal labor law comes through in the scores of NLRB complaints in at least 26 states.

The retail giant has long been accused of wide-ranging anti-competitive practices, such as in a Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit joined by 17 states that provided details of a secret algorithm, codenamed “Project Nessie,” that predicted products for which Amazon could raise prices and keep them at elevated levels. Tech watchdog groups have further documented the consumer-data “dragnet” that Amazon rolls out, and class-action lawsuits accuse Amazon of secretly spying on consumers through their cell phones.

Like his fellow megabillionaires Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, Bezos is in the “space race” through his aerospace and space flight company Blue Origin. In contrast with Musk’s more apocalyptic warnings, Bezos tends to describe his vision for settling space as one of choice—he recently predicted millions of people migrating to space “in the next couple decades,” drawn by the abundant opportunities. He’s sketched out a comic-book-worthy vision of enormous rotating space colonies, millions of them containing trillions of people, some worlds with themes, some stations that might be zero-gravity. Nevermind that on Earth, his company is plowing ahead with data center construction that comes with steep environmental costs. His pitches his dreams of moving data centers off-planet to cut down on their planet-warming impacts, but even Amazon executives describe space-based centers as economically unfeasible. The world’s efforts at futuristic AI data centers powered by clean energy might be further along if Bezos had not paid zero in federal income taxes in recent years, and if Amazon were not arguably the most notorious tax avoider among Big Tech firms, according to tax researchers.

And like others in his top-most billionaire class, Bezos is active in the field of anti-aging, such as by reportedly investing in a “cellular rejuvenation” startup Altos Labs. Bezos’ muscle gains have been pronounced enough that some internet users have lobbed accusations of him using performance-enhancing drugs, but he denies it, crediting sleep, workout, and diet. He must get the kind of restful sleep that comes when he’s not significantly bothered by protests of his extravagant Venice wedding.