Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 287 posts

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

#81

Post by Waterluvian »

alextheparrot wrote: post #34
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

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.

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

#82

Post by rocmcd »

noitsnot wrote: post #57
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.

I feel like these panels always try to make you answer 'gotcha' type of questions without providing a full answer or context.

This exactly. The line of questioning is very combative, and they will ‘claim back their time’ if your response doesn’t go along with their narrative. These hearings are more like televised platforms for them to create sound-bites they can use in their campaigns.

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

#83

Post by ashtonkem »

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.

Companies regularly use this trick to get away with crimes. They might explicitly forbid something illegal, not setup the actual guard rails that would prevent it, and then give employees every single possible incentive to break the rules. The moment they're caught they can act shocked, shocked, to discover that gambling was going on in this establishment, and then throw the line level workers under the bus.

This is exactly what Wells Fargo to get away with opening fraudulent accounts in their customers names.

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

#84

Post by Barrin92 »

makoz wrote: post #74
Barrin92 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?

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 controls.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

philwelch wrote: post #53
alextheparrot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon is fundamentally a store. Third party sellers on Amazon are the equivalent of Girl Scouts: the store lets them sell cookies on the premises but that’s not what the store is there for. IMO third-party sellers are close to a dark pattern since it’s so hard to distinguish them from actual sold-by-Amazon product listings. Costco does similar things—both my ladder and my blender were things I purchased at Costco un…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by gruez »

jjoonathan wrote: post #73
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.

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…

>Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject ...

Isn't there a saying for this? "the plural of anecdote is not data"?

This reminds me of the meme that facebook/google is listening in on you without you knowing it, the evidence for which is mountains of anecdotes of people claiming that [product] showed up on their ads shortly after them talking about [product], despite them never expressing an interest in [product] to facebook/google. Despite the mountains of evidence, no one was able to provide a shred of solid evidence of the fact (eg. decompiled binary, network capture, runtime analysis).

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

#87

Post by PhineasRex »

tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

This is more like a landlord evicting a restaurant and then opening a copy of that restaurant in the same location

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

#88

Post by jjoonathan »

gruez wrote: post #86
jjoonathan wrote: post #73

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…

>Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject ... Isn't there a saying for this? "the plural of anecdote is not data"? This reminds me of the meme that facebook/google is listening in on you without you knowing it, the evidence for which is mountains of anecdotes of people claiming that [product] showed up on their ads shortly after them talking about [product], despite them never expressing an interest in [produc…

Let's get some data! Perform discovery!

A self-serving non-answer is even less reliable than a pile of anecdotes. It would be utterly ridiculous to elevate this one to the dignity of "data."

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

#89

Post by mc32 »

lemmsjid wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's having your cake and eating it too. I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.

I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous. Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated article…

I wouldn’t be mad if they had their own products without using data mining to compete against their sellers. It’s that they use advanced data intelligence to compete.

If they competed naively (had a hard wall between their market place division and their consumer products division, I wouldn’t have an issue.

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

#90

Post by babesh »

alextheparrot wrote: post #34
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

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…

This distinction is not hard and fast even in the physical world. Just go to original department stores in Paris. They have a mix of stalls for merchants and the general store.

Also many landlords (airports, arenas, etc...) charge a percentage of sales instead of a fixed rate (and even fixed rates can be adjusted based on perceived revenue).

Amazon is basically the Internet version of WalMart. WalMart used its power to force suppliers' margins to near nothing thus lowering prices for consumers and making the WalMart heirs some of the richest people in the world. Amazon uses its power to improve the consumer experience overall thus making Bezos the richest person in the world.

The complaints leveraged at Amazon have analogues to those leveraged at WalMart. Also, WalMart has copied Amazon's online strategy including being a store/bazaar hybrid.

This area would seem to be very hard to legislate. I suspect that most of the tech giants are now partly competing with each other and partly with the next big innovations. Amazon became WalMart's competition with the rise of the Internet.

Post reply on HN