COMPANY PROFILE

Amazon

Headquarters: Seattle, United States · Listed: NASDAQ: AMZN

6 fines or sanctions

What it does and how it makes money

Amazon sells products in its online and physical stores, offers services to third-party sellers, advertising and subscriptions such as Prime, makes devices such as Alexa and Ring, and sells cloud services (AWS) to businesses.

Most of its sales come from retail in North America (USD 426,305 million in 2025) and internationally (USD 161,894 million); AWS brought in USD 128,725 million. ^[1]

What data it collects about you

According to regulators, Amazon uses customers' personal data for targeted advertising, placed advertising cookies on amazon.fr without consent, and Alexa kept children's voice recordings and location data.

How it turns your data into money

Amazon collects what you give it, automatic information about your use of its services (interaction with products and content, cookies and identifiers, including on other sites with content served by Amazon) and information from third parties. It uses that personal information to show you interest-based ads, and says it does not use personally identifying information for that and is not in the business of selling customers' personal information. It gives advertising companies information through an advertising identifier, not your name, so Amazon ads are more relevant and their effectiveness can be measured. If you look at sneakers on Amazon, you may see ads for that kind of product on other sites and apps. ^[2]

Where it is incorporated

Amazon.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation with principal offices at 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, Washington, founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and listed on Nasdaq; its European headquarters are in Luxembourg, where it operates through entities such as Amazon EU S.à r.l. and Amazon Europe Core S.à r.l. ^[3]

Taxes and low-tax countries

In 2017 the European Commission found Amazon had received tax advantages in Luxembourg and ordered it to repay €250 million; on December 14, 2023 the EU Court of Justice rejected the Commission's appeal and upheld the 2021 annulment, as it had not been established that the tax agreement was incompatible state aid. Its 2025 annual report adds that in September 2022 the Luxembourg tax authority denied the tax basis of certain intangible assets Amazon distributed from Luxembourg to the U.S. in 2021, a position Amazon considers without merit. ^[4]

Competition and monopoly

On December 19, 2022 the European Commission made Amazon's commitments binding after preliminarily finding it dominant in the French, German and Spanish markets for marketplace services: not to use sellers' non-public data for its retail business and to treat all sellers equally for the Buy Box and Prime. In Italy, the competition authority fined it €1.13 billion in December 2021 over marketplace and logistics practices, affirmed by the administrative tribunal in September 2025 with the fine cut to €752 million (under appeal). In the U.S., the FTC and 17 states sued in September 2023 for illegally maintaining a monopoly; trial was set for October 2026. ^[5]

Money

716,924 million USDRevenue 2025 ^[1]

77,670 million USDNet income 2025 ^[1]

1,576,000Employees (2025) ^[1]

Fines and sanctions

In total: 1,025 million USD + 37 million EUR

FTC · United States · September 25, 20251,000 million USD
Settlement with the FTC, which accused it of enrolling customers in Prime through deceptive designs and making cancellation hard: USD 1 billion civil penalty, plus USD 1.5 billion in customer refunds (not counted as a fine). Amazon did not admit wrongdoing. ^[6]
FTC · United States · May 31, 202325 million USD
Civil penalty agreed with the FTC: Alexa kept children's voice recordings and location data for years and did not fully delete them when parents asked (COPPA). These are the FTC's allegations, resolved by settlement. ^[7]
FTC · United States · May 31, 2023
Settlement with the FTC (Ring, an Amazon subsidiary), which accused it of letting employees and contractors access customers' private videos and of lax security that let hackers take over accounts. Ring would pay USD 5.8 million for customer refunds, not a fine. ^[7]
AEPD · Spain · 20222 million EUR
GDPR (Amazon Road Transport Spain): requiring self-employed drivers to provide criminal record certificates without a legal basis. ^[8]
CNPD (Luxemburgo) · Luxembourg · July 15, 2021~~746 million EUR~~ annulled
GDPR (Amazon Europe Core): processing personal data for targeted advertising without a valid legal basis, lack of transparency and failures on access, rectification and objection rights. Upheld by the Administrative Tribunal in March 2025; annulled by the Administrative Court on 2026-03-12, which confirmed most breaches and sent the case back to the CNPD to decide a new sanction. ^[9]
CNIL · France · December 202035 million EUR
Placing advertising cookies on amazon.fr visitors' devices without prior consent or adequate information. ^[10]

Data breaches and hacks

We found no published data breaches when we checked it on October 12, 2026.

Ask it to delete your data

With GUARDIANA or GUARDIANA ZERO, you download from this same profile the letter asking it to delete your data, under your country’s law, ready to attach to an email.

Its website

https://www.aboutamazon.com/

Does this company follow you? GUARDIANA ZERO, GUARDIANA’s browser, cuts its connections and shows you how many times it tried. Meet GUARDIANA ZERO →

Sources

What this profile does NOT say

It does not say this company does anything illegal. The only thing it states about anyone’s legality is what a regulator or a court has already decided, with the date and the link to the source.
It does not say what data of yours it holds: only the company knows, which is why you have the right to ask it.
If you are this company and a fact is wrong, write to hola@guardianagroup.com and it will be corrected, with its date.

Public facts with their sources, checked on October 12, 2026. All profiles →