The government requested that a federal judge order the business to produce additional documents.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has accused Amazon of exploiting the vanishing messages feature of Signal to conceal communications as part of its antitrust lawsuit against the business, as stated in a court document that Newtechmania was able to examine. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asserts that the shop proceeded to delete its communications automatically, despite the fact that the agency had informed it that it was being investigated and requested that it keep them. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy and previous CEO Jeff Bezos are among those who have been accused of wrongdoing.
“For years, Amazon’s top executives, including founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, discussed sensitive business matters, including antitrust, over the Signal encrypted-messaging app instead of email,” the Federal Trade Commission said in the complete document, which was acquired by The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos. Even after Amazon was made aware that the Plaintiffs were conducting an investigation into its behavior, these executives activated the ‘disappearing message’ feature of Signal, which deletes messages in an irreversible manner.
The Federal Trade Commission is requesting that a federal judge order Amazon to reveal information that pertain to the company’s data handling practices. According to the government agency, the shop did not reveal its use of Signal until March 2022, which was three months before a story published in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the covert technique.
It is said in the paper that “the app shows when a user turns the disappearing message feature on, off, or changes the timer for deletions, leaving breadcrumbs showing that Amazon executives’ deletions were widespread.” This is despite the fact that it is difficult to recover the contents of messages that have been deleted. It is clear that Amazon executives utilized Signal to discuss business concerns that were linked to competition, as evidenced by the communications that were not removed.
It would appear that the problem is becoming an increasingly widespread issue in Silicon Valley’s corporate practices. Over the course of the previous year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made allegations that Google routinely deleted its internal chat records, which the company was legally obligated to save. In addition, prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent rebranding of the firm as X, the company submitted a request to a judge to impose sanctions on the Tesla founder for his use of Signal’s auto-deletion feature to conceal messages that were exchanged over the application.
According to The Washington Post, the full document identifies General Counsel David Zapolsky, former CEO of Worldwide Consumer Jeff Wilke, and former CEO of Worldwide Operations Dave Clark as individuals who participated in the practice. Bezos and Jassy are identified as being among the individuals who participated in the practice.