Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

rocmcd wrote: post #82

noitsnot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This exactly. The line of questioning is very combative, and they will ‘claim back their time’ if your response doesn’t go along with their narrative. These hearings are more like televised platforms for them to create sound-bites they can use in their campaigns.

This is a game for two. Politicians try to score soundbites. Businessmen try to obscure misdeeds.

Amazon admitted to using aggregated seller data for competitive purposes. That's not illegal, but it should be, and congress should fix the gaps in the laws. Since Bezos doesn't want this, he dragged the conversation into the weeds (the aggregated/non-aggregated distinction and the proving-a-negative discussion).

That's fine. Everyone acted in their self-interest, as expected. What confuses me is how ridiculously effective the diversions were. This thread is full of people chasing the chaff. People who ought to know better.

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

#122

Post by alexpetralia » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

jxramos wrote: post #107

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 t…

Yes, he easily had the most substantive and thoughtful responses of the 4 in my opinion.

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

#123

Post by concernedctzn » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 12:58 AM UTC

wiredone wrote: post #100

ashtonkem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

well, they already lost everyone's trust for allowing the sale of low quality knock offs so who's to say we won't find out about some major privacy violations in the coming years?

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

#124

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

rapind wrote: post #109

gruez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do all this. Then someone asks you whether you can promise that Amazon employees don't access the data. You are unable to promise it. The newspaper headline reads: "Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data".

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

#125

Post by jariel » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

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.

"And Bezos committed to doing that.?"

Why on earth would we believe him?

It could be a widespread practice he's happy to overlook.

I don't believe anyone in AMZN retail is looking at S3 bucket data, but I do believe they are looking at sales data from the online store, no doubt.

It's not like Walmart or Walgreens isn't doing this.

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

#126

Post by Grimm1 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:06 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #95

Grimm1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say it did, I said you used a bad analogy to make your point. Don't put words in my mouth to make up for your poor analogy.

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

#127

Post by rrix2 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

tehwebguy wrote: post #116

DSingularity wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Is it abuse for Amazon to compete with their sellers? I don't think so, it's just like Best Buy selling their own brand of TV mounts & HDMI cables and prioritizing them over other brands they carry. There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract). Even outside…

> Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).

this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.

Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.

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

#128

Post by paulryanrogers » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

wiredone wrote: post #100

ashtonkem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Co-mingling inventory does not inspire trust

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

#129

Post by objektif » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

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.

Do you have access to encrypted data? How does any company can guarantee your password is secure?

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

#130

Post by nrmitchi » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

jdm2212 wrote: post #110

PhineasRex wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. "Ama…

> "Amazon took my idea and did the same thing at lower cost"

This isn't always the case, as many merchants have pointed it out. Sometimes (I'm sure not all the time), it's more "Amazon took my idea, and all the validation work I did in order to develop and prove it and build a market for it, and is selling it below cost in order to force everyone else out of the market"

I'm not passing judgement on whether that is okay or not; I'm pointing out that Amazon "winning marketshare" does not mean that they're doing it in a better way, or at a lower cost. Sometimes it just means that Amazon is able to spend/risk a whole lot more money than anyone else.