I had just started my master’s degree in artificial intelligence when a classmate asked if I’d heard of Amazon, a new online bookstore where you could order basically any book in the world and have it shipped to your front door. Feeling all the excitement of a middle school book fair flooding back, I entered the world of Amazon.com and ordered a beautiful book. It felt revolutionary and futuristic but still cozy and personal. At the end of that year, 1995, Amazon sent loyal customers, including me, a free coffee mug for the holidays.

It would have been hard to imagine then that the small business famously run out of Jeff Bezos’ Bellevue, Wash., garage would be celebrating its 30th anniversary and a mind-bending $1.97 trillion net worth today. I continue to use Amazon to order gadgets and basic necessities, watch movies and shows and read books on a Kindle. I do all of this even though I know the once-beloved bookseller has become a data-hungry behemoth that is laying waste to personal privacy.

Today, Amazon sells basically everything and knows basically everything, from our favorite toilet paper to our kids’ questions for Alexa to what’s going on in our neighborhoods — and has let police in on that, too! Amazon knows where we live, what our voices sound like, who our contacts are, how our credit histories are, at what temperature we like to keep our homes and even whether we have allergies or other health issues.

Based on this information, the company infers a whole profile: It potentially knows whether we’re gay or straight, married or divorced, Republican or Democratic, sexually active or not, religious or secular. It knows how educated we are and how much money we make. And it uses this data to sell to us better.

As a privacy researcher, I advocate for strong consumer privacy protections. After spending the better part of a decade going through privacy policies with a fine-tooth comb, I can safely say that Amazon has been worse for privacy than nearly any other company. It’s not just that Amazon has awful privacy policies; it’s also that, along with Facebook and Google, it co-authored our terrible targeted-ad economy, built on siphoning as much data as possible from users so that anyone with access to it can manipulate you into buying more stuff.

Considering the importance of freedom to America’s origin story, it’s ironic that the country is so beholden to a company that has manipulation of our free will down to a science.

“Did you just buy these Italian coffee beans?” Amazon asks us. “Here’s what you should buy next.”

Privacy and free will are inextricably intertwined: Both rest on being left to decide who we are, what we want and when we want it without anyone watching or interfering. Privacy is good for our mental health and good for society. Neither corporations nor governments — which have a way of acquiring the data the companies collect — should have access to unlimited knowledge about who we are and what we do all the time.

Amazon has played a pivotal role in making that possible. Its war on privacy took a particularly dystopian turn recently in Britain, where some train stations were using an Amazon artificial intelligence system called Rekognition to scan passengers’ faces and determine their age, gender and emotional state, whether happy, sad or angry; identify supposedly antisocial behavior such as running, shouting, skateboarding and smoking; and guess if they were suicidal. It’s like Orwell’s thought police came to life, but instead of Big Brother, it’s Big Bezos.

The worst part is that we just went right along with this intrusion in exchange for cheap stuff and free two-day shipping.

Unfortunately, Amazon has become almost a basic necessity. But we can take steps to rein in its worst consequences.

Consumers shouldn’t bear the burden of making Amazon better; policymakers and regulators should. A good place for them to start is with the American Privacy Rights Act, legislation currently before Congress. It isn’t perfect, but it would at least address our glaring lack of a federal privacy law. State privacy laws form a patchwork that varies widely in how well it protects consumers.

We need to start thinking of data privacy as a human right. The idea that companies have a right to all the data they can collect on and infer about us is absolutely bonkers. Thirty years ago, no one would have agreed with it.

This isn’t how the world should work, and it’s particularly terrifying that this is where we are as we enter the age of artificial intelligence. Generative AI programs, like the chatbots we hear about constantly, are designed to root out as much personal information as they can, supposedly to make them more effective. And Amazon is upgrading its Alexa assistant to incorporate generative AI technology.

Nothing I can impulse-buy on Amazon will help me feel better about a future with no privacy, mass surveillance and pervasive monitoring of our feelings and tendencies. What started as a beautiful book and a free mug has yielded a world where everything I buy, everywhere I go and, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, every emotion I feel can be tracked and turned into inferences to sell me more stuff or push dangerous ideologies or advance any other purpose that corporations or governments deem useful. If it sounds dystopian, that’s because it is.

Jen Caltrider is the director of Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project.

On the outskirts of this coastal village — just past the road sign telling visitors they are “Entering a Socially Acknowledged Nature-Loving Town” — a big wooden placard displays a set of hand-painted numbers. They are changed each morning.

“Days Without a Bolinas Post Office,” the sign reads.

On June 1, that number hit 456.

That’s how long it has been since the U.S. Postal Service was booted from its office in downtown Bolinas amid a fight with its longtime landlord.

In this artsy little town in west Marin County — a haven for poets and painters, writers and actors — the loss hit hard. The 1,500 citizens of ZIP Code 94924 have fought to get their post office back with their most cherished tool: creativity.

They have picketed with placards reading, “Real Mail Not Email!” They have marched in local parades dressed as letter carriers. They have composed songs and written poems and sent thousands of letters, in hand-painted envelopes, to USPS officials.

They even drafted their own plan for a temporary post office, offered to fund it, and sent it to Congress.

“It’s a very Bolinas approach, breaking through bureaucracy through art and culture and pleas,” said John Borg, who is helping lead the citizens campaign. “This has taken way longer than it should.”

The approach is quirky, but the loss is serious.

Most people in this aging rural community abutting the Point Reyes National Seashore do not get home delivery. They relied upon daily trips to the post office for parcels, pension checks and mail-order prescriptions, not to mention the chance to catch up on the small-town scuttlebutt.

Now, they must drive at least 40 minutes round-trip, through the forest on Highway 1, to a flood-prone post office at a campground in the even smaller town of Olema.

Enzo Resta, a longtime resident and founder of the new Bolinas Film Festival, compared reaction to the loss of the post office with the so-called “hype cycle” around new technologies.

“There was the crash, where there was a lot of hope and indicators we would get it back — the peak of inflated expectations,” he said. “When it got pushed a little further, we kind of went into the valley of despair, and we’re just trying to crawl back out.”

The Bolinas post office shut down on March 3, 2023. It had occupied half of an unadorned single-story wooden building on Brighton Avenue — most recently shared with a liquor store — for six decades.

The USPS already was a tenant when Gregg Welsh, of Ventura County, acquired the building about 50 years ago. His family trust currently owns it.

The relationship between landlord and tenant soured long ago.

Most people in Bolinas do not get home delivery and relied upon daily trips to the post office for their parcels, pension checks and mail-order prescriptions.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

According to a statement provided by Welsh through his attorney, Patrick Morris, the USPS for years violated its lease, which required it to maintain and repair the flooring at its own expense.

The postal service, the statement reads, discovered asbestos in the floor tiles in 1998, but essentially kept it hidden from the landlord for more than two decades and did not post warning signs for the public or employees.

When Welsh visited the Bolinas post office in late 2020, the statement reads, he saw worn and broken tiles and exposed, deteriorating subfloor materials.
The landlord and the postal service tussled over who should pay for repairs and asbestos abatement.

The USPS lease, according to the statement, ended in January 2022, with the parties still arguing over the floor. The postal service continued to occupy the building, sans lease, as a “tenant at sufferance.”

In a February 2023 email to USPS officials, which Morris provided to The Times, Morris said his client had not yet evicted the post office, in part because he had not wanted to deprive Bolinas residents of postal facilities before it could find a new location. But at that point, Welsh had had enough. He demanded the post office vacate the building within a month.

Kristina Uppal, a Bay Area-based spokeswoman for the USPS, did not respond to questions from The Times about accusations made by the landlord or about the alleged presence of asbestos in the building. She said the USPS was “forced from the old facility due to the unexpected termination of a lease,” but that there are no plans to permanently close the Bolinas post office.

“We are just as eager to resume retail operations in Bolinas as the community and provide enhanced accessibility such as expanding street delivery to alleviate any inconvenience,” Uppal wrote.

Bolinas residents sent more than 2,500 “art” letters with personalized appeals asking U.S. Postal Service officials to resurrect mail service in their town.

(John Borg)

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Residents want their post office back, but their trust in the USPS has frayed.

The dust-up in Bolinas comes as U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy, appointed when former President Trump was in the White House, is under fire for efforts to consolidate postal facilities. In a May letter, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators criticized his 10-year plan, Delivering for America, arguing that cost-cutting measures have degraded service and disproportionately affected rural communities.

Bolinas residents say they have had little direct communication from the USPS over the last 15 months. Bolinas, they note, had a post office since 1863, but townsfolk were given less than two weeks’ notice before it closed.

Their mail has been bounced around — rerouted first to Olema, then to nearby Stinson Beach because of flooding, then back to Olema. Sometimes, their letters were left in unsecured bins on outdoor tables.

The relocation has been more than just an inconvenience for the town’s elderly residents, many of whom cannot drive. There is little public transit, and more than half the town’s residents are 65 or older.

People began reporting problems getting mail-order medication soon after the post office closed, according to the Marin County Board of Supervisors. They also have struggled to get lab results and healthcare coverage updates.

Borg, 62, is a type 1 diabetic who had his insulin delivered through the mail before the closure. Now, he said, package delivery is so iffy that he drives two hours round-trip to San Rafael each month to pick it up at a pharmacy.

Bolinas’ poets and painters have been integral to the town’s campaign for a post office. Here, an artist who goes by StuArt, creates the sign that will count the days Bolinas goes without service.

(John Borg)

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Borg runs a small business, making stainless steel drinkware, and has had two five-figure checks for his company lost in the mail.

He said residents of the unincorporated town — which has no mayor or city attorney advocating on their behalf — had to band together to make their voices heard.

Appealing to the outside world is a tall order for a place so famously reclusive that, for years, a vigilante band called the Bolinas Border Patrol stole road signs on Highway 1 directing travelers into town. Once, when the California Department of Transportation tried painting BOLINAS on the blacktop, sneaky citizens promptly blacked them out with tar.

“We’re a small village that kind of likes to keep to ourselves and deflect attention and not be super profile. But we’re in the process where the town is changing,” said Borg, noting that a growing share of Bolinas’ limited housing stock is being used as second homes for the wealthy and short-term vacation rentals.

“The one thing that holds this place together is the post office.”

There has been no viable commercial real estate in tiny Bolinas for the post office to move into permanently. And a 1971 water meter moratorium has effectively prohibited development for the last 53 years. The moratorium, which has been challenged and upheld in court, was put into place because Bolinas has a limited water supply, mostly coming from the Arroyo Hondo Creek in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Last spring, residents drafted a detailed proposal for a temporary facility — a mobile office trailer on a parking lot next to the fire station — and offered to raise $50,000 for its installation.

Bolinas residents note they were given just two weeks’ notice that their post office — a fixture in town since 1863 — was closing.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

They sent the plan to a supportive Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), who shipped it to DeJoy. A spokesperson for Huffman said his office has been in frequent contact with the USPS and shares the community’s frustration over the slow process.

Uppal, the USPS spokeswoman, said the agency has “reviewed proposals” and “will select a site that best meets our operational needs and can provide continued service to the community long term.”

“I can confirm there is a potential option that is under review now,” she wrote. She did not provide details.

In his written response to questions from The Times, Welsh, through his attorney, said there has been discussion with USPS about moving back into its former building. No further details were provided.

For now, Bolinas residents continue to haul up to Olema — and to lionize the simple pleasure of picking up their mail locally. Or, as one local poet put it in an ode penned for a “Save the Post Office” rally:

I have gossip to send to Tomales,
regrets to send to Limantour Beach.

But it’s Bolinas — always Bolinas — I dream of finding
in the return address of a letter sent to me.

It was a spectacle (and for some, a menace) when droves of suit-clad young men showed up to theaters for 2022’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru.”

Against all odds, the #Gentleminions social media phenomenon showed that the Minions — up until that point, a staple of Facebook memes shared by very-online moms — could evolve as a cultural touchstone for that coveted demographic, Gen Z. The Minions had come full circle, staying relevant to the children who first met the yellow mischief-makers in 2010’s “Despicable Me” all the way through their young adult years.

It’s the kind of organic marketing that studios and theater owners can only dream of. Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment are counting on that multigenerational popularity to propel the franchise’s latest installment, “Despicable Me 4,” which comes out in theaters Wednesday.

So far, the signs are good. The movie is tracking to garner at least $100 million in ticket sales for the U.S. and Canada for the five-day Fourth of July extended weekend.

The last “Minions” movie broke Fourth of July domestic box office records and went on to make $940 million worldwide. This time around, families are already primed to hit the theaters with the recent success of Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” which has now grossed more than $1 billion in global ticket sales.

“I’ve been 25 to 28 years in the business. I can’t remember something that created that much excitement for the audiences,” Francisco Schlotterbeck, chief executive of theater chain Maya Cinemas, said of the overall Minions craze. “The other thing I can compare it to is ‘Toy Story.’”]

Theaters have been eager for good news. Exhibitors earlier this year were walloped by a dearth of blockbusters, partly due to Hollywood’s long summer of strikes in 2023, which delayed multiple high-profile titles. Though a string of recent hits has brought relief, with “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “Inside Out 2” and “A Quiet Place: Day One,” domestic revenue remains down 19% from last year, according to Comscore.

“Despicable Me 4” is expected to continue the momentum. Maya Cinemas’ ticket pre-sale numbers for the sequel are trending up, and Schlotterbeck is expecting sales that are “triple of a normal week.” Family-friendly movies, like the “Despicable Me” franchise, do especially well with Latino audiences, he said, which his chain is geared toward.

After a tough first half of the year with limited films to show, he’s expecting better sales for the months ahead, especially with family films such as “Moana 2,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and “Wicked” coming down the pipeline.

“All these big family titles will help,” said Schlotterbeck, whose chain has five locations in California and one in Las Vegas. “It’s pretty important to have these kind of very well-known franchises.”

Theaters are preparing for all kinds of Minions fans to flood the gates this weekend. Dine-in theater chain Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas USA plans to raffle off themed baby carriers that hold a popcorn bucket to tie in with supervillain Gru’s new role as a dad, said Luis Olloqui, company chief executive.

“Having the previous ‘Minions’ movie was really good, in terms of performance,” he said. “We saw that excitement among the people going to the movie dressing up and making it more of an event. This time, we are expecting kind of the same.”

The cross-generational popularity of the Minions stems from their cute appearances and humorous antics. But part of the appeal is also that they’re a bit of a blank slate, said Carrie Wilson-Brown, an instructor at the University of Illinois’ College of Media. In the same way that Sanrio icon Hello Kitty has advertised both motor oil and diamond necklaces and regularly wears all teams’ baseball caps, the Minions have become a canvas on which you can project whatever you want.

Minions are on all manner of merchandise these days. There are Minion Chia pets, Minion mugs, Minion sandwich makers and Minion toasters. For Los Angeles residents, there’s even the giant Minion that peeks over the edge of a Universal Studios parking structure to spy on the 101 Freeway (which has spawned memes of its own).

“You can infer anything out of it,” Wilson-Brown said. “They can even travel culturally, not from generation to generation, but from country to country because they don’t speak a particular language.”

It’s how the Minions joined the front lines of Facebook mom memes, which typically pair a picture of a Minion with unrelated sayings such as “I didn’t fall, the floor just needed a hug” or “I’ve been hiding from exercise. I’m in the fitness protection program.”

But the #Gentleminions craze was a turning point, when Gen Z consumers tried to take back the Minions of their childhood, Wilson-Brown said.

“You note your popularity specifically when you get internalized into meme culture,” she said. “In terms of ‘Despicable Me’ and the Minions specifically, all of a sudden, they kind of transcended out of the film into internet culture.”

Companies face a delicate dance while trying to court Gen Z audiences, who have expendable income they’re willing to plunk down on pop culture merchandise. Try too hard to appeal to them, and it seems inauthentic; try too little, and it looks like the product isn’t actually meant for them.

“Film companies and traditional media are desperately trying to constantly see what Gen Z-ers are producing in a cultural milieu, but in many respects they’re trailing behind them,” Wilson-Brown said.

Will the #Gentleminions return for a second ride?

“I’d be hard-pressed to believe they’re going to be re-creating that same thing over and over again,” Wilson-Brown said. “Because that was so organic, it’s really hard to then predict … what they are going to end up doing to up the ante, culturally, for this particular film.”