The fact that Amazon, the company that once secretly erased copies of 1984 from people’s Kindles, is now facing the most costly consumer protection settlement in the FTC’s recent history is particularly ironic. The similarities speak for themselves. In 2009, Justin Gawronski, a high school student, misplaced both his annotated copy of the Orwell novel and the notes he had been taking for class in the middle of an assignment. He filed a lawsuit. After Amazon issued an apology and referred to the action as “stupid,” most people moved on. However, the fundamental query remained unanswered. What does Amazon retain, and what is it able to reclaim?
It’s a louder question now. The FTC obtained a $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon in September 2025 for what authorities claimed were years of misleading Prime enrollment and an internal cancellation procedure intended to discourage customers. The civil penalty is one billion of that. About 35 million customers who, according to the agency, were coerced or duped into subscriptions they didn’t want are expected to receive the remaining $1.5 billion.
Although the numbers are stunning, they aren’t the most intriguing aspect. The intriguing part is hidden in the documents that the FTC obtained for discovery, in which Amazon staff members called subscription-driving “a bit of a shady world” and called unwanted enrollments “an unspoken cancer.” That’s not what you write in a Slack message unless you’ve stopped acting like everything is alright.
The data is what lies beneath all of this, and very few people are discussing it in public. Amazon’s Prime system does more than just take payments. It gathers behavior. what you nearly purchased. What you left in a cart at one in the morning. what you saw twice. You paused the shows. Your delivery driver’s path past your front door. On the surface, the settlement doesn’t seem to require Amazon to forget anyone, but it does require operational changes, a clearer decline button, plain-language disclosures, and an easier cancellation process. And that’s where a more subdued legal pressure is beginning to emerge.
Advocates for consumers are already claiming that any customer who was tricked into enrolling has a legitimate claim to the information that Amazon collected as a result of that trick. Drawing on European-style right-to-erasure reasoning that American courts have largely shied away from, it is an unresolved legal theory. It’s not ridiculous, though. Regulators are questioning what gives the company the right to retain the file if your consent was fabricated.
In contrast, the 2009 Kindle case seems almost antiquated, yet it established the standard. A device that consumers paid for, acting on behalf of a trusted company in ways they had not authorized. At the time, the EFF requested that Amazon permanently disable any technical ability to access Kindles. Amazon was never entirely on board. It is still possible. It has simply been retired in a courteous manner.
There is a pattern that is difficult to overlook when looking at this entire timeline, from Prime traps to Orwell deletions to the ongoing dispute with Perplexity over control of online shopping agents. Amazon continues to develop infrastructure under the covert assumption that users won’t ever rebel. Then someone does it every few years.
It remains to be seen if this most recent settlement genuinely alters the company’s intuition. When you consider Amazon’s quarterly revenue, two and a half billion dollars seems like a huge sum. The precedent, the discovery documents, and the slow, almost reluctant notion that consumers may have the right to be forgotten by a company they never meaningfully chose to join may have a greater lasting impact than the dollar amount. It’s still unclear. However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the question is now being posed.
