You're presumably giving them a view into your home and its location. You'd potentially be required to change security settings on your computer, to re-enable things that had been explicitly disabled. You're likely to also want to close whichever browser tabs or open programs that might be deemed unprofessional.
Those are all things that I'd consider invasive that I don't have to deal with during an in-person interview. And the wording is just creepy anyhow.
True enough, but not everybody actually lives in places where on-site testing is an option, and they'd probably prefer cleaning their room up to not having the ability to apply for a job.
And given that all of this happens voluntarily, and assuming that Amazon isn't going to infect you with malware(which seems very unlikely) this kind of testing is a great opportunity for people who have the resources or time to show up in person.
There's some kind of privacy chauvinism involved in these discussions that ignores the realities of people who don't live next to the Amazon HQ.
What I wrote was just a reaction to when you said that the arrangement wasn't a privacy invasion. I don't have any problem with off-site testing, just this particular implementation of it, which seems uncomfortably distrustful, like a harbinger of what working there would be like.
> And given that all of this happens voluntarily
There's voluntary in the sense of willingly (I have no reservations about doing this; heck, I'd offer even if you didn't ask me to), there's voluntary (I choose to do a thing that sucks because I don't seem to have another choice), and there's everything in between. My problem is when the "voluntary" action is more on the negative side of that scale, which it often is when someone's looking for a job.
I'm not trying to criticize candidates' choices. I'm trying to criticize Amazon's implementation of their hiring process. The point isn't that "candidates should be principled enough not to stand for it", but that Amazon should decide "this way sucks, let's find something better".
> assuming that Amazon isn't going to infect you with malware(which seems very unlikely)
True, they just have you voluntarily install someone else's malware.
Those are all things that I'd consider invasive that I don't have to deal with during an in-person interview. And the wording is just creepy anyhow.