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Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

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Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#61

Post by Nasrudith »

userbinator wrote: post #27
clubm8 wrote: post #14

> The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks. Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust , not just skill. When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your em…

Don't forget that China is ultimately a far more collectivist society, and stuff like this happens all the time. The money just provides additional motivation; people's natural tendency is to share things.

I think the distinction is shame vs guilt society if anything. Guilt is more intrinsic while shame is more external socially. China is more shame with their concept of face. Telling the customers their meal might be a bit late is loss of face even if it arrives on time. Insisting everything is fine and stalling up until it may or may not arrive is the "proper" thing to do.

Essentially that seems promotes both "do what it takes" and "do what you can get away with".

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#62

Post by reaperducer »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #58
reaperducer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Costco only has a specific set of things that I'm looking for I think, as a society, we're going to have to get away from the notion that buying everything in one place is the ideal. We distribute computing, diversify investments, and decentralize everything from government offices to manufacturing. I think a certain amount of decentralization in shopping is OK if it means I don't have to deal with Amazon's c…

I fully agree with your sentiment, but... The trouble with taking shopping back to brick and mortar is that half the best stores, and especially the eclectic specialists that had the interesting and quality things, have closed down over the last 10 years. Leaving many areas with little more than basics and discount chains. In good part thanks to Amazon and the rise of online. Five or more years after it closed I stil…

Backing out of everything at Amazon could prove difficult.

You are absolutely right. But this is a problem that was solved once before. It was plain old "mail order."

What Amazon built is an amazing logistics platform. But it got polluted by individual sellers and fly-by-night operations. Imagine ordering from a Sears catalog and not knowing if what you ordered is genuine or not.

If Amazon, or some other company, put together a platform that leverages modern-day logistics for small businesses, it would be a massive boost to the quality of what we buy, the variety of what we buy, and the small business economy.

Think of it as 21st-century mail order. Except instead of Amazon monopolizing the front end with an enormous shopping web site filled with garbage, it allows individual shops to use their own web sites on the front, and Amazon's distribution on the back end.

Amazon can keep the bulk of the crap on the front side and continue to co-mingle counterfeit garbage with quality merchandise. But at the same time allow individual merchants the ability to piggy back on its distribution.

And if Amazon doesn't want to do it, maybe FedEx or UPS, or some other company. I see lots of ads about "What can Brown do for you?" and a lot of promises. But I've never seen a company offer Amazon-class logistics that work.

If I can order a real item by phone, text, web, or whatever comes next from a small shop in Portland, Oregon and have it arrive from that store in the next day or two, I would certainly choose that over taking a chance going to a massive web site and getting a cheap knockoff drop-shipped from China.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#63

Post by MrLeap »

GenericsMotors wrote: post #12
3pt14159 wrote: post #9

I've been wondering why this doesn't happen more often now that the crypto game has figured out international payments.

Probably because crypto is only useful insofar as it can be converted into useful fiat currencies, which means that it can be tracked.

Tons of bullion exchanges will allow you to buy precious metals with cryptocoin. How trackable is it if someone uses a new wallet for each transaction, and has their gold bars shipped to model homes and abandoned property within ~25-50 miles of their location?

If you're speaking in absolutes, you're not using your imagination!

I can think of tons of schemes to anonymously extract real world spending power from crypto coins..

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#64

Post by Latteland »

jlarocco wrote: post #54
rifung wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely have systems in place so that employees can not just randomly look at customer data, and when it is necessary it is always logged. Even if we need to debug customer issues we would need a good reason to look at data over just metadata. There are strict requirements for what can go in logs and dashboards also as you can imagine. > Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to pro…

Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly? I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.

I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired when I worked there https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google...

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#65

Post by onetimemanytime »

Not surprising, here's a scenario: It's 2007. A poker company, a credit card aff site or a lawyer referral service offers $250K cash to a Google Search employee for tips on how to rank #1 for their top keywords. Even $1 Million if it lasts for x months. All you need is b*lls, er audacity, which exists in certain pockets, and a little time to find a connection. I think they would be takers. Ranking on top would be worth (back then at least) tens of millions so why not share the FU money?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#66

Post by paulpauper »

clubm8 wrote: post #14

> The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks. Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust , not just skill. When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your em…

Or not let low-level Chinese employees have access to secrets. Apple is known for being very punitive against leakers and is very secretive. It seems to work for then.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#67

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #52
Kalium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it perhaps possible that your priorities might not find a reflection in all hearts? Many people do not regard the time, energy, and resources that go into the logistics of managing many vendors to be good investments for them. This can be compared to distributed computing, somewhat distributed manufacturing, distributed government, and diversified financial portfolios. Each of the items you so correctly, wisely, a…

Many people do not regard the time, energy, and resources that go into the logistics of managing many vendors to be good investments for them I don't disagree with this at all. I was one of those people for many years. But more and more I'm not that person anymore. I don't think it's a good thing that one method (the all-centralized Amazon/Wal-Mart/Costco/Meijer hypermarket) be elevated to the status that it has, whe…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#68

Post by reaperducer »

reaperducer wrote: post #62
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your sentiment, but... The trouble with taking shopping back to brick and mortar is that half the best stores, and especially the eclectic specialists that had the interesting and quality things, have closed down over the last 10 years. Leaving many areas with little more than basics and discount chains. In good part thanks to Amazon and the rise of online. Five or more years after it closed I stil…

Backing out of everything at Amazon could prove difficult. You are absolutely right. But this is a problem that was solved once before. It was plain old "mail order." What Amazon built is an amazing logistics platform. But it got polluted by individual sellers and fly-by-night operations. Imagine ordering from a Sears catalog and not knowing if what you ordered is genuine or not. If Amazon, or some other company, put…

You know, re-reading that, I'm not entire sure what I'm on about. It makes sense in my head, but doesn't seem to translate well to text. I guess I'm just disappointed that the internet was supposed to free us from the tyranny of a few large companies deciding what we can buy, and we've let the same thing happen all over again. All we done is change the names from Macy's to Amazon, Sears to eBay, and Wal-Mart to... Wal-Mart.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#69

Post by wmeredith »

paulpauper wrote: post #66
clubm8 wrote: post #14

> The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks. Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust , not just skill. When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your em…

Or not let low-level Chinese employees have access to secrets. Apple is known for being very punitive against leakers and is very secretive. It seems to work for then.

Is this sarcasm?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#70

Post by mediterrenean »

clubm8 wrote: post #14

> The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks. Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust , not just skill. When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your em…

I do not think this is due to low wages. Quality of ones morality is not necessarily measured by ones wage. If one is corruptible/corrupt there’s always a price point (or some other excuse) one falls for it.
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