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Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

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Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#61

Post by tracer4201 »

noitsnot wrote: post #57
granzymes wrote: post #48

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

I feel like these panels always try to make you answer 'gotcha' type of questions without providing a full answer or context.

This feels like hyperbole, though I hope Congress gets to the bottom of it if it’s really true.

On one hand, I can see an employee who maybe has performance metrics that incentivize this behavior. Without sufficient oversight, any policy against using this data would become pointless.

I can also see that Bezos wouldn’t want to make a strong claim guaranteeing it doesn’t happen. He would perjure himself if it’s occurred even once.

I’m more interested to learn if it’s systemic or if it’s just outliers. One is a company incompetently benefiting from not enforcing its own policies whereas another is more egregious.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#63

Post by gruez »

Barrin92 wrote: post #55
granzymes wrote: post #48

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!

How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#65

Post by Barrin92 »

gruez wrote: post #63
Barrin92 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!

How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.

encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#66

Post by mantap »

philwelch wrote: post #53
alextheparrot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I’m familiar with goes as follows: Stores choose all their goods, bazaars provide stalls for merchants. People don’t like when one tries to masquerade as the other, or, be both. Costco, being a store, can choose foods or goods that have been rebranded or independently sourced and no one really cares — they are still fully autonomous. They have always taken ownership of the product, so a change in supply…

Amazon is fundamentally a store. Third party sellers on Amazon are the equivalent of Girl Scouts: the store lets them sell cookies on the premises but that’s not what the store is there for. IMO third-party sellers are close to a dark pattern since it’s so hard to distinguish them from actual sold-by-Amazon product listings. Costco does similar things—both my ladder and my blender were things I purchased at Costco un…

Have you been on Amazon recently? Third party sellers dominate it.

Amazon is fundamentally a bazaar that does a good job of pretending to be a store, but the mask is starting to slip.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#67

Post by monadic2 »

granzymes wrote: post #48

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

I mean he could mention what controls they do have to prevent this, that’d be a decent start.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#68

Post by _acco »

granzymes wrote: post #48

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

The key is "access controls." The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data.

Rep. Jayapal was pressing on this, and Bezos mentioned policy but never access control.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#69

Post by oh_sigh »

rmrfstar wrote: post #60
oh_sigh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be wary of stories you hear. People like to embellish to make themselves sound interesting or as if they have some embargoed knowledge. I worked at Amazon and heard stories from other people(who worked there, but didn't know I worked there since I just describe myself as a programmer if people ask and not an amazonian) about things I knew to be untrue

Are there indicators we can use to differentiate people who actually have embargoed knowledge from people engaging in puffery?

Really hard to say. There was a project veritas(which is a sad joke of an outfit) video with a Google employee where they got her to say all sorts of untrue things about the company because....she wanted to impress anew acquaintance? Puff herself up?

It happens all the time. Honestly I'd be inclined to disbelieve secret knowledge shared with me unless it was by a close associate who I knew well and trusted to be honest.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#70

Post by GoodJokes »

granzymes wrote: post #48

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

They could stop being a platform for sellers AND seller. Maybe you can only pick one.
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