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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

#91

Post by rapind »

gruez wrote: post #76
Barrin92 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Store it encrypted and log access.

For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels.

To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example).

The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet).

Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves.

This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).

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

#92

Post by knolax »

Waterluvian wrote: post #81
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…

Interesting point. The bazaar part of amazon is the worst part for me. It’s purely noise. I hate it and do whatever I can to filter it out. I just want the store part of amazon and like their basics brand stuff.

In certain parts of the world supermarkets are built to be two stories or more so that the ground floor may be rented out to small vendors. I don't see anybody object to that.

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

#93

Post by justsomeuser »

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.

> How can you prove a negative?

I think in science you cannot "prove a negative" because you cannot observe all the events in the system (the universe).

But if you can observe all events in a system (Amazons data access logs) I think you can "prove a negative" by proving that the data was not accessed.

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

#94

Post by scarface74 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
makoz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Two options. Don't offer those services for third party vendors that don't want to hand their data to Amazon and tell the customers it's between them and the vendor, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. Alternatively a proper secrecy management system that allows customers/vendors to expose particular data to Amazon for those purposes without handing everything and the kitchen sink over, with fine-grained control…

Disclaimer: I also work at AWS.

As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? It’s already to the point where I filter on Amazon Prime eligible and if possible sold and shipped by Amazon.

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

#95

Post by jjoonathan »

Grimm1 wrote: post #80
jjoonathan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Letting companies get away with incentivizing bad behavior and diffusing blame doesn't make for good policy.

Just as companies earn the monetary rewards of their actions, they should also earn responsibility for their actions.

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

#96

Post by scarface74 »

alextheparrot wrote: post #34
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…

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…

Stores also sell on consignment and force companies to take back unsold goods. It’s especially the case for media like magazines and back in the day CDs.

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

#97

Post by ponker »

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.

It's like asking to prove that you haven't been hacked. You can't. The questioner should have been asking about access control, how many people allowed to access, rules about accessing, auditing, how audits are screened for violations, how many people have been caught for violations (if it's zero then you know you have a problem), how they were punished, etc.

Of course hard to see how a Congressperson would know about any of this. Congress should be bringing in domain experts to ask these kinds of questions.

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

#98

Post by throwaway98797 »

justsomeuser wrote: post #93
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.

> How can you prove a negative? I think in science you cannot "prove a negative" because you cannot observe all the events in the system (the universe). But if you can observe all events in a system (Amazons data access logs) I think you can "prove a negative" by proving that the data was not accessed.

So employee A who should access data sees it and than tells employee B who shouldn’t.

Breached and now you lied to Congress. You can’t control everything that happens in your company.

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

#99

Post by ponker »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
makoz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Two options. Don't offer those services for third party vendors that don't want to hand their data to Amazon and tell the customers it's between them and the vendor, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. Alternatively a proper secrecy management system that allows customers/vendors to expose particular data to Amazon for those purposes without handing everything and the kitchen sink over, with fine-grained control…

Option 1 simply won't work for customers. If a customer is buying something from the Amazon.com website they should expect to be able to get answers about it from Amazon. If a customer was defrauded or didn't get their product etc., Amazon should not be allowed to throw up their hands and say "I don't know what you're talking about."

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

#100

Post by wiredone »

ashtonkem wrote: post #83
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.

Companies regularly use this trick to get away with crimes. They might explicitly forbid something illegal, not setup the actual guard rails that would prevent it, and then give employees every single possible incentive to break the rules. The moment they're caught they can act shocked, shocked, to discover that gambling was going on in this establishment, and then throw the line level workers under the bus. This is…

I know of many ex amazon employee anecdotes where people were “taken in the night” (didn’t have a job in the morning), and had their credentials and their teams credentials rotated due to a customer or seller data access overstep.

As with most conspiracies the facts don’t add up super well in this case for Amazon - their whole company is based on trust. The cost of losing it would be huge, so they’d be super driven to stamp it out.

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