Opinion: Happy birthday, Amazon? Why one longtime user isn’t celebrating the tech behemoth’s 30th

I had just started my master’s degree in artificial intelligence when a classmate asked if I’d heard of Amazon, a new online bookstore where you could order basically any book in the world and have it shipped to your front door. It would have been hard to imagine then that the small business famously run out of Jeff Bezos’ Bellevue, Wash., garage would be celebrating its 30th anniversary and a mind-bending $1.97 trillion net worth today. It’s not just that Amazon has awful privacy policies; it’s also that, along with Facebook and Google, it co-authored our terrible targeted-ad economy, built on siphoning as much data as possible from users so that anyone with access to it can manipulate you into buying more stuff. Its war on privacy took a particularly dystopian turn recently in Britain, where some train stations were using an Amazon artificial intelligence system called Rekognition to scan passengers’ faces and determine their age, gender and emotional state, whether happy, sad or angry; identify supposedly antisocial behavior such as running, shouting, skateboarding and smoking; and guess if they were suicidal.