Jeff Bezos and Amazon Execs Used An Encrypted Messaging App to Talk About ‘Sensitive Business Matters,’ FTC Alleges

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) declared in a Thursday court filing that Amazon executives, consisting of creator Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassygone over “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 workers to protect Signal messages till over fifteen months after Amazon understood that Plaintiffs’ examination was underway,” the FTC composed in the filing.

^{Amazon creator Jeff Bezos. Picture by SAUL LOEB/AFP by means of Getty Images}

The FTC called Bezos, in addition to other senior executives like Amazon’s leading legal representative David Zapolsky, as a few of the leaders that utilized Signal and its vanishing messages function.

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The filing is one piece of a larger antitrust case that started in September when the FTC taken legal action against Amazonimplicating the retail giant of unlawfully keeping a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.

Amazon reacted that the claim might adversely affect both the customers who go shopping on its platform with greater rates and the independent companies that offer items through it.

In Thursday’s filing, the FTC requested for more details about how Amazon’s management informed workers to interact on Signal, consisting of when to utilize it and if there specified guidelines 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 claims were “unwarranted” which Amazon divulged its Signal usage to the FTC “years earlier.”

Doyle likewise informed Company Insider that “the FTC has a total image 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.”