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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

#101

Post by rapind »

makoz wrote: post #74
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?

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

How is this relevant?

Why do you need aggregated sales data for these use cases? Presumably bad internal actors aren't going through order history records one at a time and pasting into Excel! This problem could only exist if you could query large amounts of sales records. Cynically I suspect Amazon has tooling specifically to identify lucrative products.

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

#102

Post by llsf »

Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data. Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ? If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label). Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store. I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales). Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...

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

#103

Post by gruez »

rapind wrote: post #91
gruez wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). T…

All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".

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

#104

Post by lemmsjid »

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…

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, though, on what constitutes abuse (and thus an anecdote for your assertion). Amazon openly mines third party sales data to bolster its in house brands, just as Costco does with Kirkland, Walmart with Parent's Choice, Trader Joe's does with their house brand, etc..

Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.).

There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists?

I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.

Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.

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

#105

Post by justsomeuser »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #98
justsomeuser wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed, once data passes via human-human communication its not possible to observe 100%.

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

#106

Post by DSingularity »

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 don’t think he needs to “prove a negative”. Just show us that you care about upholding the trust your sellers place in you to act ethically.

What if he said “we care about our sellers. To prevent abuse by our Amazon basics team we have isolated independent customer data from our amazon basics team and firewalled the teams with access to the data from the rest of the companies. Independent audits and training are used to minimize the risk of inappropriate access to this sensitive data. “

If Bezos said that wouldn’t you feel better?

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

#107

Post by jxramos »

Bezos gave an incredibly forthright set of testimony. I like how he continued to answer in the affirmative when the interrogator continued to drop the aggregate quantity scope. Can they do it for 3 sellers, yes, for 2 yes. That's basic mathematics, the aggregation will take place over however many are in the pool be it 100, 50 or even 3. Seems like Bezos stuck to the facts and reality on that one.

His comment about trying to give helpful answers too when questioned about organized stolen goods. Bezos did a fine job, his replies were coherent, concise, and didn't bumble trying to coordinate and mobilize a bunch of caveats and statements with extensive justifying or clarifying context that could not be delivered in the compressed timescale he was afforded.

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

#108

Post by cwkoss »

dastbe wrote: post #41
shanemhansen wrote: post #31

So I used to work with someone from Amazon retail. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that Amazon mined their seller data to undercut them. We sold on Amazon and he constantly told us that we were fools to do so. He even mentioned that prior to accepting a position he had looked up our seller performance to make sure he was going to a good company. Maybe policies have since changed. At the time I was also told the mo…

I can't comment on any of the meaty stuff, but I can comment on the silly. > At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube. Not knowing when this was, but I can say around 2013-2015 that this wasn't a general thing[0]. Could there have been an engineer who used it a lot? Sure, but there's a lot of them. Even if you disregard the crudity of it, it also…

50 gallon barrel of lube was a real SKU, I remember a friend sending me the link because he found it amusing.

Was a couple thousand dollars IIRC

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

#109

Post by rapind »

gruez wrote: post #103
rapind wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). T…

All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' s…

It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.

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

#110

Post by jdm2212 »

PhineasRex wrote: post #87
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…

This is more like a landlord evicting a restaurant and then opening a copy of that restaurant in the same location

If the landlord can run the restaurant as profitably as a restaurant operator could, then either the landlord or the restaurant operator was in the wrong business before. Property management and restaurant management are very different businesses that require very different skills, and it's pretty rare to be able to do both very well, which is why landlords normally lease the space to professional restaurateurs.

"Amazon took my idea and did the same thing at lower cost" is basically another way of saying "I wasn't adding any value but was still capturing a bunch of money on all those sales". Maybe there's an argument there that Amazon is freeloading on market research, and we should have some kind of intellectual property protection for market research, but that seems like it'd be a policy disaster. And there are lots of businesses out there already that piggyback off their competitors' market research (for instance, Burger King supposedly just locates anywhere McDonald's can operate profitably).

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