Internal documents describe how Amazon's lobbying helped it kill or undermine privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 US states
has been the primary opponent to our efforts to pass good privacy laws. The fact that they privately gloat about killing the IL geolocation bill says everything about who Amazon really is. https://www.reuters.com/... via @SpecialReports Chris Bing / @bing_chris : A very normal/healthy thing for a company to state as its own internal goal: “we want policymakers and press to fear us” https://www.reuters.com/... https://twitter.com/... Brett Heinz / @brtthnz : One reporter “found that Amazon had more than 90,000 recordings Alexa devices made of [their] family members since 2017.” If you own an Alexa or Echo device, you should smash it with a hammer. https://twitter.com/... Alexandra Ulmer / @alexandraulmer : The architect of Amazon's under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. https://twitter.com/... Lawrence Hurley / @lawrencehurley : “One reporter's dossier revealed that Amazon had collected more than 90,000 Alexa recordings of family members between December 2017 and June 2021 - averaging about 70 daily.” https://twitter.com/... Jeffrey Dastin / @jldastin : .@Amazon has killed or undermined privacy protections in over three dozen bills & 25 states, internal docs & interviews show. Behind the campaign was Jay Carney and a new mantra: “We want policymakers and press to fear us.” Story w/ @c_kirkham @adityakalra https://www.reuters.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Reuters investigation lands on top of an already dense record of Amazon operating outside public view. Earlier reporting documented how the company is quietly building surveillance-state infrastructure, and journalists have described a PR operation that intimidates and misleads reporters — aggressive, sometimes deceptive press tactics that now read differently against an internal mantra to make policymakers and press fear the company.
What is new here is the legislative ledger: internal documents describe a campaign, architected by Jay Carney, that killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states. It converts scattered statehouse losses for privacy advocates into evidence of a deliberate, coordinated strategy — and it arrives alongside reporting on Amazon's increasingly close ties to the DOJ and FBI, including tipping agencies off about employees and sellers.
First-order effects
- Privacy advocates and state lawmakers in the 25 affected states now know their bills were not losing on the merits but to a targeted Amazon operation, changing how future geolocation and consumer-data proposals get drafted and defended.
- The documents put Jay Carney's lobbying shop directly in the spotlight, forcing Amazon to defend both the outcomes (dead privacy bills) and the stated internal goal of making policymakers and press fear the company.
Second-order effects
- Other large platforms now have a validated template: an under-the-radar, state-by-state lobbying campaign can smother privacy legislation before it becomes a national precedent, lowering the cost of the same play elsewhere.
- Because state-level protection was the fallback as federal privacy legislation stalled, its suppression leaves US consumers with a thinner patchwork — and shifts pressure toward federal regulators and litigation, where Amazon's documented conduct gives critics concrete exhibits.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US privacy governance is decided less in legislatures than by the veto power of the largest platforms' lobbying operations — a structure where scale itself buys regulatory immunity, and accountability migrates to courts, enforcement agencies, and exposés like this one rather than elected bodies.
- Combined with the surveillance-infrastructure buildout and law-enforcement relationships already reported, the through-line is a company whose data collection expands while the legal counterweights are dismantled from within — raising the stakes for any eventual federal privacy framework, which would have to be written around decades of successful statehouse blocking.
The trend: US privacy regulation is increasingly shaped by platform veto power at the state level, with the biggest companies' lobbying operations determining which protections survive rather than legislatures deciding what passes.