Organization: Amazon.com Inc.

Year: 2019

Whereas: our Company, through Amazon Web Services (AWS), developed and is marketing to government and law enforcement agencies, a facial recognition system (Rekognition), that we believe may pose significant financial risks due to its privacy and human rights implications; Whereas, human and civil rights organizations are concerned that facial surveillance technology may ultimately violate civil rights by unfairly and disproportionally targeting and surveilling people of color, immigrants and civil society organizations; Whereas, hundreds of Amazon's employees have petitioned our Company Chief Executive Officer to stop providing Rekognition to government agencies, a practice detrimental to internal cohesion, morale, and which undermines Amazon employees' commitment to its retail customers by placing those customers at risk of warrantless, discriminatory surveillance; Whereas, in the past our Company has publicly opposed secret government surveillance and our Chief Executive Officer has personally expressed his support for First Amendment freedoms and openly opposed the discriminatory Muslim Ban; Whereas, the marketing of this technology could also be expanded to foreign authoritarian regimes, resulting in our Company's surveillance technologies being used to identify and detain democracy advocates; Whereas, over seventy civil and human rights groups, joined by academics, employees, and other stakeholders have called upon our Company's Chief Executive Officer to stop selling Rekognition enabling a "government surveillance infrastructure,"; Whereas, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that Amazon's Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress with people who have been arrested for a crime, in a test that relied on the software's default settings; Whereas, there is little evidence to suggest that our Board of Directors, as part of its fiduciary oversight, has rigorously assessed the magnitude of risks to our Company's financial performance associated with the privacy and human rights threat to customers and other stake holders

Resolved: Shareholders request the Board of Directors commission an independent study of Rekognition and report to shareholders regarding: c The extent to which such technology may endanger, threaten, or violate privacy and or civil rights, and unfairly or disproportionately target or surveil people of color, immigrants and activists in the United States; c The extent to which such technologies may be marketed and sold to authoritarian or repressive foreign governments, identified by the United States Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices; c The financial or operational risks associated with these human rights issues; The report should be produced at reasonable expense, exclude proprietary or legally privileged information, and be published no later than September 1, 2019.

Supporting Statement:We believe the Board of Directors' fiduciary duty of care extends to thoroughly evaluating the impacts on reputation and shareholder value, of any surveillance technology our Company produces or markets on which significant concerns are raised regarding the danger to civil and privacy rights of customers and other stakeholders. The recent failures of Facebook to engage in sufficient content and privacy management, and the resulting economic impacts to that company should be taken as sufficient warning: it could happen to Amazon.