Relevant to this: Lina Khan's influential analysis - "Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox" https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
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Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#392Sometimes I wonder if Shopify’s long-term plan is to do something like this. It's probably the leading direct-to-consumer platform out there right now, it’s touted sometimes as the anti-Amazon. The leading D2C brands I’ve seen are on there (Allbirds, Atoms, Untuckit) as well as random drop shippers. Shopify is also expanding into a fulfillment network too: https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment
I think they want to do something like this. The problem is that Shopify has zero traction with consumers. Until they solve the problem of getting consumers to search for products on their platform, they'll have no success. That's a tall mountain to climb.
Yeah I mean, the brands themselves have generated a lot of buzz. But the average consumer still doesn’t know what Shopify is.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.
Or your commercial landlord to not send the cleaning staff to rummage around in your filing cabinets. Which, while it could happen, is something that people don't really seem to get concerned about.
I have been chastised for not locking my desk for this exact concern. It does happen
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#394From what I have gathered at various user group meetings Scraping online web prices is pretty much done by everyone in the industry to provide for competitive pricing. It looks like Amazon took this up a notch.
On the other hand at least for Amazon's first party products you don't have to worry about them being counterfeit and I haven't had a bad experience with what I have bought from them (HDMI cords).
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#395About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…
Sounds like this head of IT isn't very good at his job if he can't explain the difference between EC2 access, databases, and web requests over TLS There are ways that you can use AWS that Amazon would have no way to access any of your data even if they wanted to.
If any decryption of your data occurs on AWS hardware (i.e. if your software in AWS has access to your unencrypted data), then wouldn't AWS also have access to it if they wanted? Even with encrypted volumes, etc, the decrypted data is present in memory, AWS controls the box with the memory in it.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#396There is going to be a coordinated attack on Amazon ahead of the US presidential election and it will have valid information and misinformation. The WSJ will no doubt be involved.
Question why and when old news is being dredged up. For example, is Amazon any worse than Wal-mart or Oracle or any other number of companies out there? If something is not contemporaneous news, then why is being being used at the point in time you are reading it? What is the motivation of the group pushing that information? Sometimes that is the even bigger story.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…
This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.
For me it's not at a similar level.
For one, banks are far more regulated than Amazon is. If governments funded departments with 10s or 100s of thousands of employees monitoring and regulating cloud computing services, then it might be similar.
But the most significant difference is that if the bank seizes my money, I'll know about it pretty quickly and can respond. If Amazon sniffs through my commercial data, I'm unlikely to ever know. Most people are far more tempted to do wrong if they know if the chances of getting caught are miniscule.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#398This is probably illegal via antitrust law -- it's inherently anticompetitive -- and just hasn't been tested. Another example of Amazon being an unethical company.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#399So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…
So, force all retail stores to divest their house brands, which they have been selling without complaint as long as I’ve been alive?
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honesty curious what crime this would be. If I rent time on someone else's server, and they look at what I'm doing on that server, what illegal thing has happened?
Seems like a pretty clear violation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act .
I'm not so sure about that.
AWS terms do not assign their customers any rights to any physical computer. And the AWS customer agreement gives Amazon the authority to access your data for certain purposes.
I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone prosecuted under the CFAA for accessing a computer that they physically own and physically control. AWS is a service, not a computer rental.