Employees Surveillance

The State Commissioner for Data Protection (LfD) of Lower Saxony Barbara Thiel has imposed a fine of 10.4 million euros on the electronics retailer notebooksbilliger.de (NBB). In addition, the company had cooperated closely with the LfD in the proceedings, which had been ongoing since 2017, "in order to ensure full compliance with the GDPR, also from the point of view of the authority". According to surveys from 2018, the company notebooksbilliger.de from the small town of Sarstedt in Lower Saxony is the online electronics retailer with the highest turnover in Germany, ahead of Mediamarkt.de, Saturn.de or Alternate.

Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labour unions, environmental activists, and other social movements.

"The documents say Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs, so I would say that it goes directly against what Amazon is saying. They indeed, at least in this one instance we know, if these documents are correct, that Amazon has used Pinkertons explicitly to spy on warehouse workers.", said Lauren Gurley of Motherboard magazine.