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

#151

Post by donor20 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

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…

But target / walmart / your bookstore can often return product for full refund to the folks making it within a time period (usually within a year).

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

#152

Post by hevelvarik » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

whyenot wrote: post #137

concernedctzn wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trust is too general a term to be very useful. I trust that amazon will get me my order swiftly, and that if it gets lost in transit or stolen from my front door, I will be made whole without any fuss. That is huge for them as a retailer. At the same time there are entire categories of products that I simply wont ever buy from them because I do not trust that the product is legit.

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

#153

Post by single_source » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

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.

whoa...

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

#154

Post by ctvo » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

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?

It certainly feels that way if your opinion was mostly from the comments section of HN. In the real world? Not so much.

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

#155

Post by ctvo » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #146

lemmsjid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

And how do you legislate for this? After a certain threshold of data collected you fall into a category that needs to be broken up?

It's not a binary offline / online business. Retailers are a mix of both, with some, like Walmart, quickly expanding their online presence as well.

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

#156

Post by dahfizz » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

DSingularity wrote: post #106

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 us…

I am seriously struggling to see why I need to feel better or worse about this situation in the first place.

How is this different than every other brick and mortar store that offers store brand items? This is a practice society has been completely happy with for decades.

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

#157

Post by tixocloud » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:44 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #146

lemmsjid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

Actually retailers are far more sophisticated than you think. Plenty of data brokers work with them to help piece together a larger puzzle. Plenty of startups willing to help them get to the sophistication of Amazon as well. Still early days for knowing consumer shopping behaviour in store but they pretty much know who you are if you signed up for loyalty cards or paid by card.

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

#158

Post by tw04 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #18

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…

Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc. I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either. Amazon on the other hand....

I hate doing this, but just want to point out the humor of people downvoting the comment without a SINGLE example to counter my point. Either you've never shopped at Costco or you're just pissed that Amazon is 100% NOT equivalent to Costco despite the really poor analogy.

And how could they be? Costco makes their money off membership fees - Amazon is attempting to make their money on driving their competitors out of business through what can only be described as monopolistic practices. Costco isn't an open bazaar that tracks goods sold and enters markets where they see "vendors" being successful. They sell a small number of items at a fair price - and don't intentionally screw their suppliers.

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

#159

Post by dahfizz » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #117

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.

Would the same principle apply to a tech company "privacy policy"? "We can't guarantee that policy has never been violated." Perhaps there is a way to make this guarantee: Do not collect the data to begin with.

Don't collect any sales data?

That would mean no reviews or Q/A section because engagement there is a good proxy for sales. Search would also be completely broken because Amazon wouldn't know what products were good.

Not to mention payment processing. How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold? Dealing with payments cannot be stateless for a number of technical and legal reasons (audits, chargebacks, accounting, etc).

Amazon collecting this data is completely legitimate. Are you concerned that Best Buy knows how many third party HDMI cables they sell while also selling their own?

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

#160

Post by deeblering4 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:58 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.

> How can you prove a negative?

Answering “no” while under oath would be a good start.