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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

#211

Post by corin_ »

tehwebguy wrote: post #196
manquer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Congress held this hearing as part of their looking at what changes to make to the law / changes to force the companies to make, so maybe they'll look at legislation that would change the situation (for example, some way of forcing Amazon to split "platform provider" and "product creator" into separate companies).

I've no idea if anything at all will come of it, or whether anything that does will be good or bad, but this hearing wasn't just about getting verbal commitments of being good from the CEOs (despite there being several questions did ask for verbal commitments in various areas).

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

#212

Post by hluska »

mhh__ wrote: post #58
hluska wrote: post #45

Does anyone believe Bezos?

Not believe as in he can guarantee they didn't?

No, I’m asking literally. “Does anyone believe Bezos?”

I sure don’t - a man with that much control and who is known for being that demanding doesn’t strike me as the type of person who could actually not know something like that (if he cared to find out). But, judging by the downvotes, the average person trusts him more than me. That’s very interesting...

Edit - I can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally.

Edit 2 - Fuck again. “I literally can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. :)

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

#213

Post by hluska »

monadic2 wrote: post #75
mhh__ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not believe as in he can guarantee they didn't?

Not believe as in “this is not a good faith answer”.

Exactly. Thanks for taking me literally. You definitely don’t deserve the downvotes but it appears the average ‘hacker’ here trusts Bezos more than us. Interesting, hey??

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

#214

Post by nindalf »

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?

> they already lost everyone's trust

Love the completely unfounded assertion. Based on what? "Top voted comments on HN say they've lost trust in Amazon, so everyone in the world must be the same"?

Let's look at actual data shall we? Turns out surveys indicate that "Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the United States, behind the military" (https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-tru...). Many other surveys indicate something similar.

If you have data that indicates otherwise, please do share.

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

#215

Post by johncolanduoni »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
makoz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer work at AWS. Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product

Two options. Don't offer those services for third party vendors that don't want to hand their data to Amazon and tell the customers it's between them and the vendor, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. Alternatively a proper secrecy management system that allows customers/vendors to expose particular data to Amazon for those purposes without handing everything and the kitchen sink over, with fine-grained control…

I don’t think this is legally possible, since Amazon is the merchant of record. That implies all sorts of reporting and retention requirements (for taxes, anti-money laundering, etc.).

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

#216

Post by ashtonkem »

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.

That’s consumer trust, which is certainly high. I’d be interested in how much companies trust amazon, that number might be very different. Both groups can have wildly different experiences with the same company, and there are a lot more consumers than there are companies ready to sell on amazon.

The original question here was not “does amazon provide a bad service to consumers”, but rather “does amazon abuse their data to compete unfairly”. Only companies would know that, end consumers won’t know why the amazon basics product exits, only if it arrives on time.

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

#217

Post by roenxi »

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. 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.

I don't completely disagree; political subcommittees do tend to be more practical than politics at large. But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something. The committee process is a legitimate one for that sort of thing, but there are much easier ways to to figure out what is going on. If they actually care about matters of fact politicians tend ask domain experts to write a report - that is a much more comprehensive and nuanced approach.

Literally everything in a committee is about building a narrative to underpin political action. And the people appearing in front of the committee will generally not be the people who were advocating for that action.

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

#218

Post by rv-de »

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.

That is what is meant by "guaranteeing". They way you interpret the term nothing ever and anywhere could be truly guaranteed and the term becomes useless.

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

#219

Post by michaelt »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #149
salawat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Are you sure that impression doesn't come from the fact things that aren't soundbites don't end up in front of you?

As I only spend 1 minute a day on political news, there's a lot of scope for politicians to do non-soundbite things and me not to hear about it.

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

#220

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

tw04 wrote: post #158
tw04 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because the point they are making is irrelevant. It doesn't matter to the discussion whether or not Kirkland brand items have other name brands next to them
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