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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

#141

Post by manquer »

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…

Same reason regular companies cannot be banks in many countries , you would be able to give loans unfairly to your other business even if they are not credit worthy. It is wrong whether it is Best Buy or Amazon to be both marketplace and seller.

Even if the controls were somewhat weak in practice, his inability to commit to that even on paper is damning.

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

#142

Post by sf_sugar_daddy »

uji wrote: post #138

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.

When I worked for a different managed services provider we did the same thing, it's not illegal or anything (depending on the contract/terms .. etc)

Most IT departments do the same on smaller scales (reading cowokers emails, slack convos ..etc) it's a job perk 'revenge of the nerds' and all that

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

#143

Post by manquer »

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.

He can certainly make that part of the contract with seller. , you would have legal recourse for breach of contract and standing to sue.

It is another matter that law should be strong enough to prevent this in the first place and AMZ or any other retailer shouldn't be needed to put in the contract explicitly.

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

#144

Post by spaced-out »

rrix2 wrote: post #127
tehwebguy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 any…

>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.

Who isn't aware of it though? Every major retailer has their own store brand, and it's been like that since before any of us were born.

At least Amazon clearly marks their brand, unlike some companies create brands like "Open Nature" which is clearly meant to disguise their origin.

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

#145

Post by run414 »

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…

When I worked at Amazon, I personally knew someone who put in their two-weeks notice, and the next day they found out they were fired when their badge didn't work. From anecdotes I've heard, this happens if Amazon suspects a person is leaving to join a competitor. Amazon is very serious about protecting their data.

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

#146

Post by manquer »

lemmsjid wrote: post #104
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…

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-ag…

There is a fundamental difference in the volume of data collected by Trader Joe, Costco et al and Amazon.

Costco at best knows what I bought at their store, Amazon knows a lot more than that. Just from the data they collect on the store they will know how many people compared what products with what else, what are they searching for, what is in who's shopping list, they will likely know demographics and lot more information about the buyers as well.

It is not remotely the same problem between online and offline.

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

#147

Post by 8note »

llsf wrote: post #102

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 factor…

Given that they're third party companies, i think the question is if Walmart can data mine the sales data from other stores in the same mall?

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

run414 wrote: post #145
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…

When I worked at Amazon, I personally knew someone who put in their two-weeks notice, and the next day they found out they were fired when their badge didn't work. From anecdotes I've heard, this happens if Amazon suspects a person is leaving to join a competitor. Amazon is very serious about protecting their data.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by thaumasiotes »

salawat wrote: post #136
BurningFrog wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 soci…

> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites.

I mean, if you watch the questioning, it's very clear that they are.

Look at e.g. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' questioning of Mark Zuckerberg.

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

#150

Post by jsizzle »

run414 wrote: post #145
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…

When I worked at Amazon, I personally knew someone who put in their two-weeks notice, and the next day they found out they were fired when their badge didn't work. From anecdotes I've heard, this happens if Amazon suspects a person is leaving to join a competitor. Amazon is very serious about protecting their data.

This is not atypical though, and it happens in non high tech industries. Why is this an issue?
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