If true this is Crony Capitalism at its finest ... I almost think a competitor planted operatives inside Amazon to pull this off - Pure Evil
Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
711–720 of 727 posts
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see as big of a distinction between Safeway and Amazon. The demand for pain medication is relatively constant, so if sales of Safeway's generic ibuprofen increase it will come at the expense of Advil because Safeway will start buying fewer units. The harm is one step removed but is still there. I think a better argument would be the scale of the data collected by Amazon vs physical stores. But on the other ha…
Maybe. One distinction I want to argue is placement: Amazon always places the Amazon Choice options at the top of the search and product listings. They also always include them in the "Popular, Editor's Picks, Highest Rated, etc." box that appears in the middle of most pages on the site. This would be like you walking into Safeway for a bag of sugar, and as soon as you turn down the aisle, there's an employee telling…
Another issue. At Safeway, Heinz ketchup is the real deal. No duplicates.
Amazon, on the other hand, has allowed duplicates, cheap reproductions and false reviews to proliferate. Now the only way you are assured a product is what it says is if it is an amazon brand.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
Throwaway account for obvious reasons. In the past, AWS has used the data from third party hosted services on AWS to build a similar service and in fact start poaching their customers. Source: I used to be at AWS and know the PM & his manager who built a service this way. I was hired on that team.
As for talking to journalists, I didn't leave with any ill will and don't want to complicate my life. I personally know a friend who got involved with journalists... his past employer came to know about it, sued him... and he became almost unemployable in the valley. Edit: fixed a typo
You should consider going to Project Veritas. They stand by their sources. Maybe it's not as likely to be published if you don't have video footage to back up your story, i don't know... but still it's worth trying. I understand wanting to play it safe though...
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... his past employer came to know about it, sued him... and he became almost unemployable in the valley. You might have a family to protect. A home to maintain, etc. I understand. It's scary. But the world doesn't and cannot change for the better if we let corporations bully us into silence. The world will and does change when brave individuals, with the support of society, stand up and blow the whistle.
Lol exactly what support will you be providing? Will you contribute to paying this person's salary for the next 10 years? I wish people would quit with the empty platitudes and the rhetoric.
Your comment reminds me of the kind seen from Russian bots. Everything about what you said matches the algos I've seen. Very interesting.
But yes, I would be happy to contribute to a support fund to support such individuals.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a bank were to seize your money, you'd notice, because you wouldn't have that money anymore. And it would be very well documented, leaving a clear paper trail to a criminal conviction and a civil suit. If your bodyguard did you physical harm, you'd notice, because your knees would hurt. And there would be ample evidence for a criminal case. If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly nev…
> If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it in a civil suit. For a thought exercise, let's play this out. Amazon copies data running through VMs (or grabs it from storage). Let's assume it isn't on hardware certified for capital-letter processing [1], most of which require regular third party audits. So…
> Except they can't leave any record of its source, in any documented form. This includes server logs, data transfers, emails about data, meeting minutes about data.
They can certainly take the risk. If crimes only happened when there was a 0% change of getting caught there would be no crime.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#716I believe this is reason enough to take the company apart. They should separate it to parts that are not that powerful and have less data.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
so you’re suggesting entire regions go down at once or one of the AZs? An entire region doesn’t go down. So again, you are not building for high availability.
US East as a whole went down several times plus a number of incidents when S3 or other critical services went down for the whole region.
i don’t remember seeing us-east go down in its entirely. show me supporting evidence or this is FUD. multiple DCs physically separated, different flood planes make up a region. it’s not easy to down an entire region. the biggest event they had, the S3 one you’re talking about, effected only 2 AZs and didn’t allow new EC2 instances to start and iirc some EC2 instances failed as well. this is a far cry from the entirely of us-east having an outage.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, maybe I'm too tired to understand this, but why can't you do that exactly?
The FTC says it's illegal: Anticompetitive practices include activities like price fixing, group boycotts, and exclusionary exclusive dealing contracts or trade association rules, and are generally grouped into two types: agreements between competitors, also referred to as horizontal conduct.
Thanks! I meant how would Amazon prevent it at all. (But maybe they would just sue you. But ... can't you just create a separate company to conduct off-Amazon business?)
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
The promise of homomorphic encryption is to allow cloud computing without giving your data away.
Without giving what data away, exactly? If for example I'm fully on amazon AWS for everything, DNS/DB/Web then no matter how encrypted your data is Amazon still has a very good idea of the effectiveness of your campaign. You can't hide the number of DNS queries. You can't hide the number of TCP SYNs. Hell, there is just a huge amount of things that encryption does not cover up, especially involving time for particula…
Don’t be obtuse. Observing some encrypted traffic going in and out gives away some info, but it’s nothing like the email addresses, addresses, names, and order history of all of your customers.
Amazon, if they wanted, could read stats from Netflix’s database about which movies drive the most engagement and use that to determine what to license for Prime video.
It’s the difference between root on the server and capturing encrypted packets on a network.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be a ban of any mixture of vertical integrating with not vertically integrating. Which in turn makes it tough to transition (either direction) between the two. So, Apple would be allowed to vertically integrate and make the chips, hardware, operating system, and applications for their products. But they'd have to stop selling Belkin chargers alongside Apple chargers at apple.com, and the iOS app store would have…
Mind explaining how this is a better situation?
It fixes a power imbalance that allows for the platforms to take advantage of their customers. A platform becoming dominant is insidious because it takes away the "choice" ... if you want to do business, you will probably have to engage with them, but as we see here, Amazon is taking advantage of the fact that they own the platform by taking their customers' (the sellers) data, and using it for themselves to put their customers out of business.