AMAZON: Exposes customers personal details through auctions

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer with over $110 Billion dollars in sales in 2020. Amazon has billions of customers across the globe who rely on the speedy delivery service they offer for delivering anything from clothing to high value jewelry and technology products. As a large retailer, Amazon deals with exceptionally huge volumes of customer returns and surplus stock that needs to be processed and resold on a daily basis. Amazon often redistributes these returned parcels through public auction organisations such as John Pyes, Direct liquidation and Liquidation.com. Although Amazon claims they remove all data from the products and packaging relating back to the customer, we have found out that auctioneers in the US,UK and EU have been selling customer returned parcels with customers address details clearly showing as well as phone numbers, email addresses and zip codes.

At Simon Charles auctioneers in the United Kingdom we can see an example of a pallet of customer returns clearly displaying a customer's full address details without any signs of attempting to cover it up or remove it. We have found over 128 similar cases within the last month of auctioneers and liquidators clearly displaying parcels with customers personal data on without attempting to hide or remove these labels. This is leaving customers data and personal information exposed to anyone who decides to look at these auction listings. This is not only a blatant data breach but is also highly illegal and Amazon should be prosecuted or investigated for its customer data policies for customer returned parcels.

Amazon hasn't specifically commented on our investigation but referred to their privacy policy which states: “We work to protect the security of your personal information during transmission by using encryption protocols and software”. “We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards in connection with the collection, storage and disclosure of personal customer information. Our security procedures mean that we may ask you to verify your identity before we disclose personal information to you”. These terms and conditions do not cover the issues we have found and do certainly not highlight to customers that their information may be shared online for anyone to see.

Amazon's returns policies and product management have recently also been investigated after ITV revealed that smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks were all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”. Products that were never sold, or returned by a customer. Almost all could have been redistributed to charities or those in need. Instead, they are thrown into vast bins, carried away by lorries, and dumped at either recycling centres or, worse, a landfill site.

We will continue to update readers on this story once Amazon publishes a formal response to our questions.

What do you think about what Amazon is doing?