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…
A grocer can get away with whitelabeling, because the manufacturer of the product is bought from as a supplier. Therefore every brand/product in the store, regardless of the manufacturer or "brand" is essentially the grocer's product. In that sense what grocer's are doing is more inventory management. None of their suppliers are "harmed" by that in house data processing.
Amazon, on the other hand, is fundamentally harming the members of it's marketplace because they never make a purchase to prop up other members of the marketplace. Instead, they use those marketplace actors in order to target high return corners of the market in which to compete without taking any of the risk; and crucially, without also making aggregate data available to all sellers.
In effect, every Amazon seller is a risk sink. Everyone else suffers the downsides of poor market fit, but if there's a sector with good profitability, you can bet that Amazon is on it as soon as possible with a brand new Amazon Basics offering. Essentially leveraging their scale to extract as much retail volume out of the market for themselves at everyone else's expense.
Dismissing this looking at seller data due to it being aggregated is like marketing one's tobacco as toasted. You're drawing attention to something irrelevant in the hopes that no one keeps going down the path that leads them to realize you're abusing your advantaged position to the detriment of everyone else involved.