- When 60,000 IT professionals descended on Las Vegas earlier this month to attend the huge Amazon Web Services re:Invent tech conference, Amazon was watching them in more ways than one.
- The company used wireless beacons attached to the badge lanyards to track attendees as they moved through the event, it said.
- Attendees could opt out by asking for a lanyard without the device, Amazon told Business Insider.
- But the beacons were the subject of a range of comments, from jests to concern, from some attendees.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is an engineer at heart and built a company that gathers data on everything it can. "People think of Amazon as very data-oriented and I always tell them, look, if you can make the decision with data, make the decision with data," Bezos once said in 2018
So it should not be surprising that when 60,000 people descended on Las Vegas earlier this month to attend Amazon Web Services re:Invent, the cloud platform's biggest annual customer conference, Amazon wanted data on what these attendees did and where they went during the show.
Specifically, the lanyards for the conference badges that Amazon issued this year included a Bluetooth beacon from a company called TurnoutNow, AWS confirmed to Motherboard's Joseph Cox.
Not everyone was aware that the badge included such tracking information, sources told Motherboard. But many were. On Twitter, people were discussing signs that AWS placed around the registration area alerting people to the tracker.
Per posts on social media, the signs said:
"Notice that object on your lanyard? It's an anonymous beacon that lets us count the number of attendees at certain event locations, so we can facilitate foot traffic, improve transportation, and help plan future events. Your beacon is not associated with your name or any other personal information about you, and it will only send anonymous data to us about our meeting space and other central gathering locations for this event. If you'd rather have a lanyard without the beacon, please visit the help desk."
Amazon also told Business Insider that attendees were free to opt out, and that accepting the lanyard was not a requirement for admittance.
Even still, given this was a conference for IT professionals, many of whom are computer security experts, a few people complained about the tracking device on Twitter, including security pro Jerry Gamblin.
Gamblin pointed out in a tweet that if some hacker figured out how to match the lanyard tracker with the name on the badge, they would no longer be anonymous. "The beacon has a unique ID so it is not anonymous and at best is pseudonymous. It would only take matching of name to the unique ID for full tracking," he tweeted.
And attendee Rachel Dines dissected hers and posted a picture on Twitter. "Did anyone else take apart the beacon on their #reinvent lanyard? I see a battery, an antennae and some unknown chips. Also, as soon as you remove the beacon from your lanyard, the QR code starts to fade #creepy"
The beacon was the subject of other jokes and banter, from opting out with a hammer to swapping lanyards with other attendees.
Interestingly, such conference attendee tracking devices are hardly a new idea. They've been used by conference organizers for well over a decade.
And it's a bit ironic that Amazon, of all companies, wouldn't use one of the cutting edge technologies it develops and sells to solve this problem, like machine learning/AI, computer vision, or even something more mundane, like the location data from its conference mobile app.
As one attendee on Twitter put it, "2008 wants their conference badges back."
Are you an insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort on encrypted chat app Signal at (970) 430-6112 using a non-work phone (no PR inquiries, please), or email at jbort@businessinsider.com. Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.
- Now read:
- 47 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2020
- The US and Microsoft are complaining about how Amazon is selectively sharing details on the JEDI deal
