According to a court document viewed by Engadget, the Federal Trade Commission accused Amazon of using Signal’s disappearing messages feature to conceal communications as part of its. The FTC says the retailer continued to auto-delete its communications even after the agency notified it that it was under investigation and asked it to preserve them. Founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos and current CEO Andy Jassy are among the accused.
“For years, Amazon’s top executives, including founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, discuss sensitive business matters, including antitrust, over the Signal encrypted-messaging app instead of email,” the FTC wrote in the full document,. “These executives turned on Signal’s ‘disappearing message’ feature, which irrevocably destroys messages, even after Amazon was on notice that Plaintiffs were investigating its conduct.
The FTC wants a federal judge to compel Amazon to provide documents related to its data handling. The government agency says the retailer didn’t disclose its Signal use until March 2022, ahead of a “Although the contents of deleted messages are impossible to recover, the app shows when a user turns the disappearing message feature on, off, or changes the timer for deletions, leaving breadcrumbs showing that Amazon executives’ deletions were widespread,” the document reads. “From the messages that were not deleted, it is apparent that Amazon executives used Signal to talk about competition-related business issues.
The issue appears to be an increasingly common business practice in Silicon Valley. Last year, the DOJ accused Google of, which it was required to preserve under federal law.