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Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

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Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#131

Post by siruncledrew »

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…

Amazon can’t eliminate bribery with certainty only by paying more. The principle of bribery is someone exploiting greed in the weakest link to get something they want.

The Chinese sellers/brokers are also successfully bribing employees because they want the information more.

They have the manufacturing to produce the things to sell on Amazon, the cheap labor to write fake reviews, and the cheap distribution/shipping to make the sale economically viable while also low-price for buyers. This is a great scenario for Chinese sellers, and a huge advantage over many US sellers that don’t have those abilities (or have to go through a middle-man to work with Chinese production anyways). The stakes are much higher with the potential to have Amazon be Alibaba 2.0.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#132

Post by notimetorelax »

jjeaff wrote: post #104
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…

Well, plenty of data gets stolen all the time. Would be tough to trace it necessarily to a Google employee. But if you say so, anonymous internet user, it must be true. (just kidding, sort of. I appreciate the info. But absent a neutral 3rd party audit, we're all just wishing and hoping.)

These things are usually audited by third parties. E&Y or PWC or Deloitte or etc.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#133

Post by taurath »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120
dmix wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship. The rest need enough wages to live off of.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#134

Post by AnthonyMouse »

taurath wrote: post #133
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship. The rest need enough wages to live off of.

> I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship.

Except that there are now a bunch of restrictions on unpaid internships that have caused companies to increasingly stop having them.

And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.

> The rest need enough wages to live off of.

In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more? Unless there isn't one, but in that case their alternative is having no employment, which pays even worse than $4/hour.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#135

Post by AnthonyMouse »

carapace wrote: post #128
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's also culture. https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle... > In early 2005 ... Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. > ...an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen...

That's still a policy failure -- poor enforcement/deterrence in that case rather than poor legislation, but still. And even to the extent that it is cultural, the policy informs the culture. If Eric Schmidt went to jail over that, would it happen again?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#136

Post by manfredo »

gaius wrote: post #130
manfredo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 requ…

That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government It is also racist to assert that Muslims are all of a single race. Like most religions there are followers of all ethnicities in all countries.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US citizens is not comparable to the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#137

Post by manfredo »

siruncledrew wrote: post #131
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…

Amazon can’t eliminate bribery with certainty only by paying more. The principle of bribery is someone exploiting greed in the weakest link to get something they want. The Chinese sellers/brokers are also successfully bribing employees because they want the information more . They have the manufacturing to produce the things to sell on Amazon, the cheap labor to write fake reviews, and the cheap distribution/shipping…

Increasing wages does, however, increase the consequences of getting caught. If someone stands to lose their $12,000 annual salary if they get caught, then selling user info for a couple thousand is tempting - it increases their annual income by double digits. By comparison, I think considerably fewer people would accept such a bribe if they stood to lose a $120,000 salary. This is Singapore's logic: their government officials are some of the highest paid in the world.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#138

Post by gaius »

manfredo wrote: post #136
gaius wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government It is also racist to assert that Muslims are all of a single race. Like most religions there are followers of all ethnicities in all countries.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US…

the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

Which government did that then?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#139

Post by cm2187 »

fipple wrote: post #98
ohnoesmyscv wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#140

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

Yeah, it’s been weeks since the last design leaked before the great reveal!
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