Jeff Bezos used a free blogging site to accuse a notorious tabloid of blackmailing him with explicit photos.Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Last week, the richest man in the world used a free blogging site to accuse a notorious tabloid – which has close ties to the U.S. President – of blackmailing him with explicit photos. The Jeff Bezos story is excellent gossip – and another distraction from how he and other tech titans chip away at everyone else’s privacy every day.
Mr. Bezos made his estimated US$130-billion fortune from Amazon, which is best known as a site that delivers cheap things really fast. Where it also makes money, though, is in surveillance technology designed for police and military forces. The most well-known is Rekognition, which identifies faces, sort of. Last year, in a test by the American Civil Liberties Union, the program falsely matched mug shots with images of members of the U.S. Congress, including storied civil-rights activist John Lewis.
That Mr. Bezos amassed a fortune invading others’ privacy makes his situation ironic, but what happened to him still a violation. His troubles began in January, when the National Enquirer threatened to publish texts between Mr. Bezos and his married lover, which he pre-empted by announcing his divorce.
Next, according to the e-mails Mr. Bezos shared on Medium.com last week, lawyers for the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc. (AMI) threatened another release of private materials. To stop it, Mr. Bezos would have to make a public statement that he had no proof that the tabloid’s interest in him was politically motivated, though he had good reason to think it might be.
The convoluted background on this starts with Mr. Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. Though by all accounts he doesn’t interfere with its journalism, two important entities might not be convinced. The first is U.S. President Donald Trump, who sometimes mentions Mr. Bezos in his regular complaints about the Post’s coverage of his administration. The second is Saudi Arabia, where the leadership is likely very unhappy with the Post’s continuing investigation into the killing of its journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
Even as American and Saudi leadership have clear (if unjustified) reasons to dislike the Post, both have friendlier connections to AMI.
Its chief executive, David Pecker is a well-known associate of Mr. Trump (though there’s speculation he might flip on the President soon). AMI’s lawyers once asked the U.S. Department of Justice whether the company should register as a Saudi lobbyist – the department said no, despite the publisher stocking retail shelves across the United States with a weird, glossy magazine lauding Saudi and its dictators last April, funder and reason unknown.
All of this explains why Mr. Bezos might be suspicious about the Enquirer’s interest in his private life. It’s also a decent reason for speculation that the source of the leaks might be some sort of government operative. This week, though, signs point to a more relatable culprit: a relative, in this case his girlfriend’s Trump-connected brother.
Mr. Bezos, it seems, is a lot like the rest of us – screamingly obtuse when it comes to understanding that if it’s on a phone, it’s not private.
Ideally, the public take-away from this story would be that privacy is far too fragile in a world that’s always online. But while most of us are concerned – a Nanos poll conducted for The Globe and Mail this week showed that more than 60 per cent of Canadians worry about how Facebook’s ad targeting will affect our October election – that concern hasn’t translated into widespread demands that those who monetize our personal information be better regulated.
The likes of Mr. Bezos and Amazon are at the top of that food chain, but there are thousands of smaller players. Local news is full of stories of hacked baby monitors or full-on digital home invasions in which needlessly smart devices are taken over remotely and, sometimes, held for ransom. But the novelty of the minute conveniences offered by smart devices – such as houses that warm up when we pull into the driveway – have obscured that it’s creepy to have inanimate objects watching over us.
Governments are sometimes suspicious when the technology comes from elsewhere (see: the concern over Huawei) but the risks from local players inexplicably get a pass. As pointed out by journalist Glenn Greenwald, it’s amazing that Mr. Bezos is emerging from this story as a sympathetic figure: another Amazon product is an app that police forces use to store sensitive public records in the company’s private information cloud.
Of course it’s fascinating that a Silicon Valley giant was technologically vulnerable enough to have his sexts hacked. The bigger question, though, is how to protect everyone else from people like him.