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"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.
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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.
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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.
Amazon also has 50% of e-commerce marketshare and nearly double Walmart's share of all retail sales.
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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.
How do we make companies follow it is different issue altogether . First step is the make liability exposure high for violating (like COPA ?) and provide consumes right to access what they have on you.
There is no technical way privacy of this or any other kind can be guaranteed, companies internal controls are always going to be opaque and data collection looking from the interfaces we can audit may not visible .
We can only make it higher risk legally and give consumers frameworks to make it easier to expose violations
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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.
But what's the rational the other way around? When an employee resigns, they obviously know that they are resigning before actually handling in their resignation. If they wanted to leave with something, surely they would have already stolen it? Or it's just an expectation of lazyness, in case nothing has been stolen yet?
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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.
I mean it’s like an impossible thing to commit to even if he wanted to, no?
Just because your safeguards will not be perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any. It is akin to saying as there are many zero days out there so I won’t secure my infrastructure at all .
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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.
I personally know someone who gave a two week notice at Amazon and had his manager ask him to stay out the quarter. It's all about relationships and reputation. People with a proven track record of quality work and strong ethics are valued there.
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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…
Interesting point. The bazaar part of amazon is the worst part for me. It’s purely noise. I hate it and do whatever I can to filter it out. I just want the store part of amazon and like their basics brand stuff.
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I think you're right that Amazon has come to dominate a lot of markets on merit. But it's still the case that having overly dominant players in a market is bad for... well everyone except the dominant player. It doesn't matter why or how it came to be.
This is not universally true. It's bad if the dominant player uses their dominance to deliver sub-par quality at high prices. But so far Amazon doesn't seem to be doing that, at least in my user experience of it. It is bad that they might one day be able to parlay their dominance into harming consumers, but the dominance itself is not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.
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Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data. However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller. "Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data…
They do, though. I have been on calls with Amazon reps to discuss how our ad campaigns have been performing, what can be done, and what additional sources of data from Amazon we can access through beta programs and the like. Individual Amazon agents of varying levels constantly check and reference the private data of individual sellers for all kinds of reasons (again, most of them justified and useful). In most such…