At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive six-page memos, quick messages between executives aren’t the place for meaningful business discussions.
That’s one of the points made by Amazon in its response Monday to the Federal Trade Commission’s allegations about executives’ use of the Signal encrypted communications app, known for its “disappearing messages” feature.
“For these individuals, just like other short-form messaging, Signal was not a means to send ‘structured, narrative text’; it was a way to get someone’s attention or have quick exchanges on sensitive topics like public relations or human resources,” the company says as part of its response, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Of course, for regulators investigating the company’s business practices, these offhanded private comments between Amazon executives could be more revealing than carefully crafted memos meant for wider internal distribution.
But in its filing this week, Amazon says there is no evidence that relevant messages have been lost, or that Signal was used to conceal communications that would have been responsive to the FTC’s discovery requests.
The company says “the equally logical explanation—made more compelling by the available evidence—is that such messages never existed.”
In an April 25 motion, the FTC argued that the absence of Signal messages from Amazon discussing substantive business issues relevant to the case was a strong indication that such messages had disappeared.
“Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs’ pre-Complaint investigation, and Amazon did not instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages until over fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs’ investigation was underway,” the FTC wrote in its motion. “It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon’s actions and inactions.”
Amazon says it has acted properly in response to FTC demands to ensure the preservation of relevant evidence. The company says it gave executives “explicit instructions on how to disable Signal’s DM [disappearing messages] feature.” A copy of those instructions has been provided to the FTC, according to Amazon’s filing.
The dispute stems from the landmark antitrust suit filed against Amazon by the FTC and 17 states in September, alleging that the company illegally uses its power in e-commerce and online marketplaces to favor its own interests.
In its April 25 motion, the FTC asked U.S. District Judge John H. Chun to require Amazon to disclose the detailed instructions given to executives about preserving relevant messages sent via Signal and similar apps.
“Discovery into Amazon’s preservation notices and instructions about preservation is the next step in uncovering the extent and intent underlying Amazon’s possible spoliation of evidence,” the FTC wrote.
Amazon opposes the motion, citing lawyer-client privilege.
The company says in its filing that it has gone out of its way to give the FTC what it needs. Among other efforts, Amazon says it voluntarily gave the agency details about executives’ Signal conversations, including 2,900 screenshots, covering topics beyond those directly responsive to the FTC’s discovery requests.
“If the FTC had seen Signal messages containing material discussion of those business practices in the 2,900 screenshots they inspected, or there was any hint that such messages ever existed in the hours of testimony they took, they would have mentioned that in their motion,” Amazon says in its response. “In fact, there is no evidence that Amazon personnel engaged in such discussions on Signal.”
Amazon’s filing quotes the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, saying in a deposition in the case that “[t]o discuss anything in text messaging or Signal messaging or anything like that of any substance would be akin to business malpractice. It’s just too short of a messaging format.”
Overall, Amazon said in a prior statement that it has cooperated fully with the FTC’s investigation, providing “a complete picture of Amazon’s decision-making in this case including 1.7 million documents from sources like email, internal messaging applications, and laptops (among other sources), and over 100 terabytes of data.”
The company’s filing traces the initial use of Signal by executives back to the suspected hacking of Bezos’ phone in 2018, which prompted the Amazon founder to seek ways to send messages more securely.
Here’s the full text of Amazon’s May 13 filing.
FTC vs. Amazon: AMAZON’S OPPOSITION TO PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION TO COMPEL by GeekWire on Scribd