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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

#71

Post by alextheparrot »

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…

We’re in agreement about all the basic premises, I think the key points I’d push back with are:

(1) I can’t “easily” register as a seller with Costco, but I can with Amazon (Or so I believe)

(2) The ease with which non-company merchants can enter is a key property of the bazaar vs store dichotomy. Easier to enter, more bazaar-like

(3) Given (2) and (1), it seems like Amazon wants to be both a store and a bazaar, which my initial post articulated as a “problematic” state, at the least. Even if only problematic through novelty

This doesn’t make Amazon good or bad, I can just see where it leads to new discussion

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

#72

Post by monadic2 »

panny wrote: post #49

Any mention if the same non-guarantee applies to third party intellectual property on AWS? There doesn't seem to be much to stop them from "borrowing" code from AWS customers without anyone being the wiser.

This is why you encrypt, it’s not impossible to bypass but it would make it a gargantuan task.

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

#73

Post by jjoonathan »

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.

If your mother caught you sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar with chocolate and crumbs stuck to your face and a quarter cookie cupped in your palm, would you expect to get away by saying "well I can't prove that I didn't sneak a cookie..."?

Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject all pointing to Amazon openly and intentionally mining third party sales data, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that Bezos dodged the question because the answer would make Amazon look bad, not because Amazon is mostly innocent and just can't prove it 100%.

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

#74

Post by makoz »

Barrin92 wrote: post #65
gruez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Disclaimer work at AWS.

Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product

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

#76

Post by gruez »

Barrin92 wrote: post #65
gruez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And what are you going to do when the customer wants to see their purchase history? Tell them "unfortunately, we can't show your purchase history for third party sellers"? What if they want to do a refund?

Even if you didn't keep purchase history for customers, Amazon would need to keep purchasing records for accounting purposes. In a multinational corporation you simply can't have money going into a black hole with no audit trail.

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

#77

Post by missedthecue »

sethherr wrote: post #27
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

Kirkland products are actually white label versions of the products they copy, produced by the company they are copying - so it’s an entirely different situation - ie Costco is paying brands for their products (albeit at a lower price), not stealing. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912991

Amazon doesn't manufacture their own Amazon Basics goods. They pay for it, albeit at a lower price.

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

#78

Post by alextheparrot »

yonixw wrote: post #43
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…

I think it is more a problem of reach\scale. If a store has a reach just like a bazaar, we need to worry about how the store operates behind the scene just like the bazaar.

Amazon seems to have only recently moved ahead of Walmart in revenue[0], so I find it hard to support the store inherently has a smaller reach than a bazaar. Am I misunderstanding your position or the nuances therein?

I think my initial post agrees with your conclusion, though, which is that trying to be both is an area that is not as defined and is part of what is causing issues.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-...

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

#79

Post by belval »

panny wrote: post #49

Any mention if the same non-guarantee applies to third party intellectual property on AWS? There doesn't seem to be much to stop them from "borrowing" code from AWS customers without anyone being the wiser.

IP theft is no joke and isn't some grey area of the law. By accessing and reusing code that belongs to someone else it would simply break the law and no-one would even try that considering how stupid it is.

Now anti-competitive behavior is much harder to control for and that's what would be at play here.

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

#80

Post by Grimm1 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #73
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.

If your mother caught you sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar with chocolate and crumbs stuck to your face and a quarter cookie cupped in your palm, would you expect to get away by saying "well I can't prove that I didn't sneak a cookie..."? Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject all pointing to Amazon openly and intentionally mining third party sales data, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that Bezos do…

That's way too simplistic since Amazon is not one person and not every person has the same morals or ethics in the company. I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. It's not a good mental abstraction for making arguments about companies.
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