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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

#131

Post by steffan »

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.

I think it's a logical fallacy to assume you can "observe all events" in any non-trivial system, particularly where there are humans on the edges.

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

#132

Post by dastbe »

cwkoss wrote: post #108
dastbe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is, but it's a single particular ASIN. And given the majority of the time issues/changes arise due the particular characteristics of a particular item (is it pantry? is it prime? is it a garment? is it a toiletry? etc. etc.) using any one particular ASIN isn't going to be viable for most developers.

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

#133

Post by shanemhansen »

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…

I can't really confirm/deny whether what he was saying was true, but I heard this from him around 2009.

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

#134

Post by BurningFrog »

jjoonathan wrote: post #121
rocmcd wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a game for two

It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

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

#135

Post by iaw »

BurningFrog wrote: post #134
jjoonathan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a game for two It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury. Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

I see an advantage to the businessmen as the net outcome. It's still business as usual and they continue reaping handsome profits for questionable practices while addressing the accusations from their 'critics'.

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

#136

Post by salawat »

BurningFrog wrote: post #134
jjoonathan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a game for two It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury. Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

>It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

>Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

Your response is odd. The fact perjury is a possible outcome if a knowingly misleading answer is given doesn't change the equation of the fundamental social interaction.

Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

The capacity to give a concise number, or the propensity to avoid answering the question speaks volumes more to the necessity of regulation than any candid response would.

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

#137

Post by whyenot »

concernedctzn wrote: post #123
wiredone wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Really? Search online for "trust amazon poll" and look at the results. People appear to have an overwhelmingly favorable opinion of Amazon.

For example, look at The Verge Tech Survey 2020. 91% of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of the company, and 70% felt they had a positive impact on society. Most of the other polls have similar results.

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

#138

Post by uji »

ex-AWS employee here. I worked in one of the managed services (can't say which one because it might reveal my identity). In Managed services, instances are created in AWS VPC so employees have access to underlying VM.

We have used that capability to get stats about the type of customer workloads, and devised feature products based on that.

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

#139

Post by JumpCrisscross »

_acco wrote: post #68
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.

> The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data

This is easier said than done. Data exists in multiple places. It transforms in the form of reports and presentations. Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure.

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

#140

Post by salawat »

monadic2 wrote: post #67
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.

That would expose confidential trade secrets and competitive intelligence. It'd also jeopardize their internal security posture to release that information publicly.

I don't buy it, but I imagine that'd be the excuse.

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