Federal regulators accuse Amazon executives of deleting messages
Source: Washington Post
April 26, 2024 at 2:37 p.m. EDT
The Federal Trade Commission is accusing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other top company executives of using disappearing messaging apps such as Signal to conceal potential evidence in the agency’s ongoing antitrust case against the e-commerce behemoth.
“For years, Amazon’s top executives, including founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, discuss[ed] sensitive business matters, including antitrust, over the Signal encrypted-messaging app instead of email,” the FTC alleged in a document filed Thursday evening. “These executives turned on Signal’s ‘disappearing message’ feature, which irrevocably destroys messages, even after Amazon was on notice that Plaintiffs were investigating its conduct.”
The agency, which first accused Amazon of intentionally deleting messages in its original antitrust complaint last fall, is now asking a U.S. District Court judge to order the company to turn over documents related to its handling of data. It’s the latest salvo in a landmark case in which the FTC is arguing that Amazon abused its dominance of e-commerce to squeeze merchants and bury rivals, leading to higher prices for customers. Bezos owns The Washington Post.
“The FTC’s contentions are baseless,” Amazon spokesman Tim Doyle said in a statement, responding to the filing alleging destruction of evidence. “Amazon voluntarily disclosed employees’ limited Signal use to the FTC years ago, thoroughly collected Signal conversations from its employees’ phones, and allowed agency staff to inspect those conversations even when they had nothing to do with the FTC’s investigation. The FTC has a complete picture of Amazon’s decision-making in this case, including 1.7 million documents from sources like email, internal messaging applications, and laptops (among other sources), and over 100 terabytes of data.” Once a company knows it is being sued or is likely to be sued, it has a legal duty to preserve documents and communications that could prove relevant to the case.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/26/amazon-ftc-messages-deleted-bezos/
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