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Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

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Re: Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Amazon is basically a type of eBay in India? You're right about the whole phone number masking thing. It's pretty simple to implement these days, so any platform that doesn't do it is probably not all that concerned about looking after their customers. There's a taxi ordering startup here in Dublin where I live that has only 10 employees and they use phone number masking, if they can do it then there's no reason w…

It's good to know that small players care about Privacy in Dublin, Then again it's the small players who can; Trillions of $ doesn't come without hiding bones in the closet. How much of it has to do with GDPR?

Probably not a lot.

It could be argued that the taxi driver needs a customer's phone number if there is a problem, so therefore it wouldn't be an issue under the GDPR. The app developers probably only mask numbers as a courtesy, and not necessarily as a legal requirement.

Re: Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

#102
post #91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..but then they still have your home address in their archive of PII. Which is bad enough (wasn't Dominos or New York Pizza hacked the other day with PII getting leaked?). I barely ever read spam (and receive it mainly on one of my older e-mail addresses but it does end up in the spam filter). I barely ever receive spam on my phone number. I won't say never, cause it has happened, but probably like twice a year or so…

Every street address is public. All houses order food. Nothing private is disclosed.

> Every street address is public.

Not quite, but I'll give it a pass.

> All houses order food.

Nope, not everyone orders food. Perhaps in your bubble.

> Nothing private is disclosed.

Incorrect, it is PII. It is a real name connected to a street address first of all (one could use an alias; I do). And, possibly (potentially) also containing metadata such as what is being ordered, at which time, and how much.

Moreover, it denotes activity. If you want to lay low, your street address might be officially public (mine is) yet not receive spam on it.

For some reason, it isn't possible to only give a business your address (and other PII) when they need it and force them to discard it completely afterwards. Why not? Because when leaks happen, they're not hold accountable. See the essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? by Bruce Schneier [1]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

Re: Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "contacted Amazon, who responded with "we'll deal with the issue and get back to you within 48 hours", which never happened" Apparently, complaining to Amazon didn't solve the problem.

> Apparently, complaining to Amazon didn't solve the problem. Amazon has different tiers of support. My understanding (from a few years ago, after being very persistent on an issue), is that their chat support people are relatively dis-empowered compared to their phone support people. So it's totally possible that one support channel could solve this problem, and other ones can't. And if that's the case, the fault is…

If an Amazon phone CSR can be trusted, that's still the case. I recently had an unusual issue that required escalation "all the way up" and at a certain point I reached a guy who claimed, at least, that that was as high as any customer could go - it was on the phone and he mentioned that the chat CSRs had much less power. He had managers of course but they were "not allowed" to speak to customers.

Re: Amazon third-party sellers reportedly hound customers who leave bad reviews

#104
post #62

How are the sellers linking a review to an identity? Are people reviewing with their full names?

I think you provide them with your shipping info, right? address, name, phone number, etc.

Yes, but how is that linked to a review?
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