The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) declared in a Thursday court filing that Amazon executives, consisting of creator Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy, talked about “delicate organization matters” in now-erased text that might have been utilized as proof in the FTC’s continuous antitrust case versus Amazon.
According to the Thursday filing, senior Amazon leaders utilized the encrypted Signal messaging app from April 2019 to May 2022 and continued to erase messages through the app’s vanishing message function– even when the FTC was examining Amazon.
“Amazon executives erased lots of Signal messages throughout Plaintiffs’ pre-Complaint examination, and Amazon did not advise staff members to protect Signal messages up until over fifteen months after Amazon understood that Plaintiffs’ examination was underway,” the FTC composed in the filing.
Amazon creator Jeff Bezos. Image by SAUL LOEB/AFP by means of Getty Images
The FTC called Bezos, along with other senior executives like Amazon’s leading attorney David Zapolsky, as a few of the leaders that utilized Signal and its vanishing messages function.
Related: Two of Amazon’s Most Popular Prime Features Might Actually Be Illegal
The filing is one piece of a larger antitrust case that began in September when the FTC took legal action against Amazon, implicating the retail giant of unlawfully preserving a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.
Amazon reacted that the suit might adversely affect both the customers who go shopping on its platform with greater costs and the independent organizations that offer items through it.
In Thursday’s filing, the FTC requested more details about how Amazon’s management informed workers to interact on Signal, consisting of when to utilize it and if there specified directions about erasing messages.
Related: Amazon Used a ‘Secret Algorithm’ to Inflate Prices by Over $1 Billion, FTC Says
Amazon representative Tim Doyle informed Bloomberg that the FTC’s accusations were “unwarranted” which Amazon divulged its Signal usage to the FTC “years earlier.”
Doyle likewise informed Business Insider that “the FTC has a total photo of Amazon’s decision-making in this case consisting of 1.7 million files from sources like e-mail, internal messaging applications, and laptop computers (to name a few sources), and over 100 terabytes of information.”