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Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

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Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#111

Post by AndrewKemendo »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #96
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coercion and Ego are almost never used because they aren't reliable and are fear based. Money and Ideology are positive incentives, Coercion and Ego are generally painful incentives.

Coercion it used all the time. Castro would send his doctors abroad, getting them paid handsomely by aid agencies and he'd take the lion's share of their income, and he'd get away with it by holding the doctor's family de-facto ransom. The Chinese government is known to do this. There's a missing item: 'Duty + Guilt'. Governments will use a softer form of this coercion whilst trying to imbue a sense of national duty…

That's not Coercion in this context, it's Money.

Think more along the lines of Honeypot and blackmail when you think Coercion in this sense.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#112

Post by Buge »

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.

Similar stuff happens to Apple. 20 Apple employees or contractors were arrested for running a business selling Apple users' data.[1] There was a different incident of an Apple employee threatening to leak a user's data.[2] There's also leaked Apple product info, such as specs, datasheets, and parts.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/china-apple-pers...

[2] http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001890/apple-employee-threate...

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#113

Post by Buge »

fcuck_actuarial wrote: post #31
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coercion and Ego are almost never used because they aren't reliable and are fear based. Money and Ideology are positive incentives, Coercion and Ego are generally painful incentives.

What I had in mind by Ego was "flattery", so in a positive sense. In retrospect, ego without M is an empty, impotent argument.

Ego without additional money could be a valid argument. A lot of engineers would leave a job where nothing gets done for an equal-paying job with a lot of impact.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#114

Post by manfredo »

ohnoesmyscv wrote: post #82
shard972 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be? Seems reasonable to not let low-level chinese employees access to company secrets given their track record.

This seems incredibly racist. There could be low level employees of other ethnicities or countries of origin leaking information. That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

> That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

No, it absolutely is not. That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government. Companies can, and do, decide not to give certain privileges to remote offices. It is not comparable to businesses refusing to staff certain positions or give certain responsibilities to remote offices. Furthermore, companies can require certain positions to be filled by US citizens (common practice in defense and aerospace companies).

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#115

Post by manfredo »

9712263 wrote: post #56
userbinator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. Selling data for their own profit is completely individualist. So-called collectivist is just another way to say government could seize anyone's personal property without permission and compensation for 'greater good', which translates to government officials's pocket.

Collectivism can manifest itself behavior like this. I can't speak to China, but I have a lot of family that migrated away from Cuba, am a descendant of Cuban immigrants myself, and met many Cubans during my time in Florida. Those that grew up in the socialist system often have a sense that cheating is okay as long as you're cheating "The Man". Maybe these days we call it cheating "the system". Basically, stealing and fraud is more tolerated if it's stealing from some faceless group or organization, like governments or companies.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#116

Post by Spooky23 »

ohnoesmyscv wrote: post #82
shard972 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be? Seems reasonable to not let low-level chinese employees access to company secrets given their track record.

This seems incredibly racist. There could be low level employees of other ethnicities or countries of origin leaking information. That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

Remember that 95% of the stuff on Amazon is manufactured in China. There’s a demand in China for sensitive information that is beneficial to the folks running the factories. Sometimes for commodity products are priced pennies apart —losing a contract can put the factory out of business.

That doesn’t mean that Chinese are inherently more risky. It’s just far more likely than an employee in China is a risk for certain types of corruption than an employee in Munich or Brazil. A warehouse manager in New Jersey might be accepting bribes, but for a different reason and different impact.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#117

Post by mikestew »

perl4ever wrote: post #110
paulcole wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it possibly be below minimum?

I found no evidence they are paid less than minimum wage, but I did find some claims casino-goers in the US are expected to tip cashiers, so perhaps the assumption is they are paid a tipped minimum wage instead of a regular one? That is not how jobs seem to be advertised though.

I’m no high roller, nor even much of a casino customer anymore, but having cashed in many tens of thousands of dollars of chips it would have never occurred to me to tip a cage cashier. They seem so disinterested in the fact that I’m standing there, it is not like they’re trying for tips. Nor have I even heard it mentioned. Now, I’m not a complete rube as I tip table and wait staff (heavily, if I’ve won big). But the person doing what I expect a casino to do: exchange their fake money for fiat? Never.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#118

Post by airstrike »

reaperducer wrote: post #34
anoncoward111 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Costco only has a specific set of things that I'm looking for, sometimes in too high quantities and at a price point that is not particularly amazing

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 travel out of my way to go to a real butcher where I can see the cows going in the back of the building, and the results in the cold case in front. I know the meat hasn't been frozen (coughWhole Foodscough), isn't in storage so long it has to be pumped full of gas to keep its color, and if I want exactly six ounces of something, I watch the guy cut it fresh right in front of my eyes.

It is truly a great privilege to be able to do that. I have neither the time nor the ability to go to a real butcher so I will keep buying from Whole Foods (or other local organic markets), tyvm

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#119

Post by [deleted] »

rifung wrote: post #49
jjeaff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any reason to have that trust? Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Had they any stringent controls in place, I feel like their PR or marketing would have communicated some of the specifics publicly.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#120

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dmix wrote: post #87
dredmorbius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noted, FWIW, by Adam Smith: The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstan…

We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies. The value and ROI from paying people more is not well promoted enough. Decades of globalism, private equity acquisitions, and corporate competition obsessed business literature where lower prices is always revered. But in knowledge/service based industries it's not always about shaving pennies to make businesses better and there are many cha…

> We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies.

This is more of a political issue than a cultural one. Companies always pay what they have to pay to get workers they need. The problem is we have policies that depress wages.

For example, the H1B program nominally isn't supposed to have foreign workers competing with domestic ones, but the rules are easy to game, so it does. The easy fix is to get rid of most of the other rules and just require employers to pay the government $75,000/year for each foreign worker they hire. Now it's impractical for someone under H1B to replace a US worker who makes less than six figures, but companies who legitimately can't find what they're looking for in the US workforce have the ability hire outside it -- for an extra $75,000/year on top of whatever salary they pay.

Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that. So they stay home and play video games, there is $4/hour less disposable income in the economy (the profit from which could have allowed someone else to get a raise), and the person who couldn't take the job/internship now has no experience to leverage into a higher paying job. Even if you want a minimum wage for career fast food workers, imposing one on college students and other people just starting out is likely harmful to wages on net.

There are many other examples of things like this. Companies or misguided people lobby for bad policies that depress wages and the people whose wages are being depressed aren't organized enough to stop it or even recognize the mechanisms by which it happens. Then people are more desperate for work and companies don't have to pay them as much.

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