This does not surprise me. I've been waiting to see corporate intelligence agencies pop up. When you think about it, Amazon had an operating budget last year of around $309 billion [1], already 75% of Germany's at $399 billion [2]. Facebook has an operating budget of around $35 billion, but that is still enough to field a small intelligence arm. Also, that is Facebook..not all Facebook properties combined.
Most of Amazon's revenue is retail sales. Buying a product for $10 and selling it for $10.10 is not comparable to $10 of government spending. After deducting cost of sales and cost of fulfilment you're left with ~$60 billion.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the bulk of their profits are from Amazon Web Services. That is potentially a factor that contributes to this skewed and awkward framing of labor.
These corporations are their own intelligence agencies. Facebook knows who your friends are, Amazon knows where you live, thanks to their line of doorbell camera, and then there's the Google-Microsoft email duopoly.
The vast majority of Amazon's operating expenses is paying manufacturers for the products that people buy, so there's really no comparison to a country's budget. Plus their margins for that are close to 0, and overall they constantly take large losses from their physical retail business in order to expand everything else.
Corporate intelligence agencies have long existed, but they don't call themselves that. They are usually called corporate law firms or PR agencies. Note that the Amazon job description was specific about working with attorneys.
Wasn't there previous news stories of FB doing exactly this? A 3rd party was hired to investigate something. It's all fuzzy, so if I'm totally wrong, someone please correct me.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/operat...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-passes-record-budget....