Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks: Amazon’s Plan to Monitor Customer Service Staff

Amazon is rolling out a sweeping monitoring program, with the goal of tracking the keystrokes and mouse clicks of its customer service staff....
Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks: Amazon’s Plan to Monitor Customer Service Staff
Written by Matt Milano
  • Amazon is rolling out a sweeping monitoring program, with the goal of tracking the keystrokes and mouse clicks of its customer service staff.

    In the era of Big Data, few companies have access to as much customer data as Amazon. The company controls the largest e-commerce platform, a line of popular security devices and, of course, the most popular cloud computing platform in the world. As a result, the company is a prime target for unscrupulous individuals looking to access that data.

    According to a document seen by Motherboard, Amazon is preparing to roll out software designed to track customer service employees’ activity in an effort to prevent abuses from occurring. The company has already had instances where imposters have impersonated customer service staff and accessed information.

    The company has looked at various solutions, including those that capture all keystrokes and mouse clicks. The one the company appears to be leaning toward focuses on capturing patterns instead, building a profile of how a person interacts with their workstation, via the keyboard and mouse. If someone else tries to use it, their usage would stand out as different from the established pattern, making it easy to spot an imposter.

    “We have a security gap as we don’t have a reliable mechanism for verifying that users are who they claim they are,” reads the document.

    The lengths to which Amazon is going illustrates the ongoing struggle companies have, and the solutions that will likely become more commonplace as threats continue to grow.

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