Amazon Told Drivers Not to Worry About In-Van Surveillance Cameras. Now Footage Is Leaking Online

Numerous posts on Reddit show surveillance videos of drivers’ actions on the road, but such recordings haven’t been posted so frequently before.

A phone-recorded video posted to Reddit shows a wooden desk strewn with various office supplies. On a monitor on the desk, a video begins to play: an Amazon delivery driver, being recorded by a driver-facing camera in their van, leans out of their window to talk to a customer. 

Though the video is cute, the setup is not: The camera’s AI tracks their movements, surrounding them with a bright green box. Below them on the monitor’s screen, a yellow line marks the length of the clip sent to the driver’s dispatcher. Above them sits a timecode and a speed marker of “0 MPH.” The driver opens their door, and moments later, a small French bulldog leaps into the van, tail wagging. The driver is delighted. The person behind the camera laughs a little.

“You seeing this, Joey?” a person says off-camera. “Little visitor.”

“Is that a dog?” says Joey, also off-camera. 

“Yeah, just jumped right in,” the first voice says. The dog hops onto the driver’s lap, and they pet it for about 15 seconds.

“What is that, a Frenchie?” Joey asks. The first person, and the person directly behind the camera recording the video, debate for a moment whether it’s a pug or a bulldog. 

“She had a little guest with her today,” the first voice says, to a fourth person off-screen, who responds, “Yeah, I see that.”

The desk set-up looks consistent with that of an Amazon delivery service partner (DSP), the small-business contractors responsible for Amazon’s door-to-door deliveries. The DSPs usually operate out of Amazon delivery warehouses, where they are given a desk like the one in the video, in a small area of the warehouse, out of which they select routes, dispatch drivers, and monitor their actions on the road with the help of the cameras. 

The video is one of a slew of in-van surveillance videos recently posted to Reddit, a phenomenon which hasn’t frequently been seen on the site before. Over the past two weeks, many users in the Amazon delivery service partner drivers subreddit (r/AmazonDSPDrivers) have shared video footage from the cameras, either directly or by recording it on their phone from a monitor within the warehouse. It is clear that many of the videos are not being posted by the subject of the video themselves, and highlights the fact that Amazon drivers, who already have incredibly difficult jobs, are being monitored at all times.

When Motherboard first wrote about the “Biometric Consent” form drivers had to sign that allows them to be monitored while on the job, Amazon insisted that the program was about safety only, and that workers shouldn't be worried about their privacy: “Don’t believe the self-interested critics who claim these cameras are intended for anything other than safety,” a spokesperson told us at the time. But this video, and a rash of others that have recently become public, shows that access to the camera feeds is being abused.

“This made my day,” the title of the post reads. Users in the comments, however, highlighted the dystopian nature of the post. 

“There's a reason why us at UPS just negotiated driver facing cameras out” one user wrote, referring to a bargaining point in UPS-Teamsters national contract negotiations that would prohibit in-vehicle cameras from recording drivers. “Shit is creepy AF.” 

Another person wrote, “They already have enough surveillance devices on us. With a camera it's just over supervising, and invasive use of technology. They tested us for 35 days on our ability to drive their vehicle, perform and qualify for our job. They can trust us without a camera in our faces.” A third called it “dystopian BS.”

It’s not always clear who is posting the video, or how they got access. Another video posted last week shows a recording of what the camera labeled as a stop sign infraction. The user who posted the video—potentially the driver—titled the video, “Bruh!!! Stop sign infraction how????”

Another dashcam video shows the driver on a narrow road facing another car, which proceeds to back up off the road into a ditch and then drive back up onto it. 

The cameras Amazon uses come from a company called Netradyne Driver-i, and they are AI-enabled to monitor drivers’ speed, location, and actions on the road. They can record both the road and the driver themselves, and even required drivers to sign consent forms for the cameras to collect biometric data in order to label their actions properly. Motherboard has previously reported on these cameras’ inaccuracy when labeling violations or distracted driving. 

“The camera sends information on if we speed, hard braking, hard acceleration, if we roll through or run stop signs, if we run red lights,” one driver, who requested to remain anonymous to prevent corporate backlash, told Motherboard. “It’ll also detect if we are on our phones or aren’t wearing seat belts properly.”

“Netradyne cameras are used to help keep drivers and the communities where they deliver safe,” Amazon spokesperson Simone Griffin told Motherboard in an email. “Delivery service partners have access to the Netradyne portal where the in-vehicle cameras automatically upload video content when there is a safety incident. Delivery service partners can choose to share the video footage with their employees. However, for privacy reasons, publishing the content externally is a violation of program policies.”

Besides Netradyne, Amazon has also used the Mentor e-driving app in the past. The app would similarly track speed, hard braking or acceleration, and phone usage—but numerous posts in the subreddit say that Mentor will soon be phased out. Griffin said that both systems are used, but that Mentor was used more frequently in non-branded vehicles.

It’s not clear why there has been a sudden spate of videos being posted publicly. One current Amazon delivery driver said that the drivers themselves did not have access to the videos—only Amazon, Netradyne, and the relevant DSPs did. They had not heard about any changes regarding that access policy.

“As far as I know, the only changes have been an object added to the top of the van, but we’ve been told it’s there to help update signs for the cameras,” the driver said “The only other thing they’ve done is given newer vans newer camera models that basically do the same thing. Amazon tried to add reversing to the cameras, so we couldn’t reverse, but we heard that was done away with quickly. They’ve also been saying that any new Amazon van is going to start getting cameras in the cargo areas themselves to ‘monitor’ the package area.”

Griffin told Motherboard in an email that there had been no new changes to the policy.

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