The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is accusing Amazon executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, of communicating with encrypted messaging apps that automatically deleted messages even after being notified that they were under investigation.
The FTC filed a motion to compel document production on Thursday. In the request, the FTC asks the judge to compel Amazon to “produce documents related to its failure to preserve Signal messages” and to disclose the company’s document preservation notices and instructions for using disappearing messaging apps.
These include Signal, an encrypted messaging service that automatically makes messages disappear when users change a feature in the app.
The FTC alleges that this is how executives discussed “sensitive business matters, including antitrust” rather than using email to destroy potential evidence.
Amazon is currently embroiled in a massive antitrust lawsuit brought by the FTC and 17 state attorneys general. The plaintiffs accuse Amazon of illegally using its monopoly position to suddenly raise prices and block competition.
The Washington Post first reported this.
The FTC alleges that Amazon employees began using Signal in 2019. The federal agency sent a letter to Amazon in June 2019 requesting the preservation of all its documents in connection with its investigation.
Companies have a legal obligation to preserve documents and communications that can be used as evidence in litigation and trials.
The FTC filing suggests that Amazon did not notify Bezos until April 2020, but that several executives continued to use Signal’s disappearing message feature.
“The FTC’s allegations are baseless,” Amazon spokesman Tim Doyle said in a statement obtained by The Post.
Amazon voluntarily disclosed its employees’ limited use of Signal to the FTC years ago, comprehensively collected conversations using Signal from its employees’ phones, and made them available to agency officials for review, even though they had nothing to do with the FTC’s investigations.
Doyle continued:
The FTC has a complete picture of Amazon’s decision-making process in this case, including 1.7 million documents and more than 100 terabytes of data from sources such as email, internal messaging apps and laptops (among other sources).
The FTC is asking the judge to compel the company to produce document preservation notices and instructions to determine “whether, when, and how Amazon employees received instructions to preserve work-related Signal messages.”
“Plaintiffs need these documents to assess whether Amazon took reasonable steps to preserve the documents and to determine what information was destroyed,” the FTC wrote in a statement.
