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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 p

"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.

Barrin92 6y ago
>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=20 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!
- gruez 6y ago
  How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    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?
    - makoz 6y ago
      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
      - Barrin92 6y ago
        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.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Disclaimer: I also work at AWS. As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? It’s already to the point where I filter on Amazon Prime eligible and if possible sold and shipped by Amazon.
        Barrin92 6y ago
        >As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy. Point being, is there a technical argument against giving the vendor/consumer control over this, as long as the nature of the sale is transparent? I don't think so. And even if you're saying that's too free-wheeling there's point two. Keeping only a track record of the data for the return period and only making it accessible if a customer demands a refund is technically possible. The anti-competitive /privacy breaching data-processing that is the topic of the thread can be completely avoided.
        kube-system 6y ago
        >> As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? > On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy. Not at all. eBay’s money back guarantee overrides any seller policies. You can definitely return eBay items that are sold as “no returns”, if they are defective, counterfeit, etc.
        6y ago
    - gruez 6y ago
      And what are you going to do when the customer wants to see their purchase history? Tell them "unfortunately, we can't show your purchase history for third party sellers"? What if they want to do a refund? Even if you didn't keep purchase history for customers, Amazon would need to keep purchasing records for accounting purposes. In a multinational corporation you simply can't have money going into a black hole with no audit trail.
      - rapind 6y ago
        Store it encrypted and log access. For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels. To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example). The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet). Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves. This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).
        gruez 6y ago
        All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".
        rapind 6y ago
        It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.
    - sitver 6y ago
      Well, taxes and accounting for starters.
noitsnot 6y ago
I feel like these panels always try to make you answer 'gotcha' type of questions without providing a full answer or context.
- tracer4201 6y ago
  This feels like hyperbole, though I hope Congress gets to the bottom of it if it’s really true. On one hand, I can see an employee who maybe has performance metrics that incentivize this behavior. Without sufficient oversight, any policy against using this data would become pointless. I can also see that Bezos wouldn’t want to make a strong claim guaranteeing it doesn’t happen. He would perjure himself if it’s occurred even once. I’m more interested to learn if it’s systemic or if it’s just outliers. One is a company incompetently benefiting from not enforcing its own policies whereas another is more egregious.
- rocmcd 6y ago
  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.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    This is a game for two. Politicians try to score soundbites. Businessmen try to obscure misdeeds. Amazon admitted to using aggregated seller data for competitive purposes. That's not illegal, but it should be, and congress should fix the gaps in the laws. Since Bezos doesn't want this, he dragged the conversation into the weeds (the aggregated/non-aggregated distinction and the proving-a-negative discussion). That's fine. Everyone acted in their self-interest, as expected. What confuses me is how ridiculously effective the diversions were. This thread is full of people chasing the chaff. People who ought to know better.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      > 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.
monadic2 6y ago
I mean he could mention what controls they do have to prevent this, that’d be a decent start.
- salawat 6y ago
  That would expose confidential trade secrets and competitive intelligence. It'd also jeopardize their internal security posture to release that information publicly. I don't buy it, but I imagine that'd be the excuse.
_acco 6y ago
The key is "access controls." The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data. Rep. Jayapal was pressing on this, and Bezos mentioned policy but never access control.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data This is easier said than done. Data exists in multiple places. It transforms in the form of reports and presentations. Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    I mean, can we get the politicians to say the government and it's employees aren't accessing data that they're not allowed to access/have?
  - _acco 6y ago
    Hence why we are here.
    - User23 6y ago
      There's a reason basically every SDE is subject to the trading window: its impossible to give them the permissions necessary to do their jobs without also giving them access to highly sensitive information.
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure. I completely agree. Before GDPR, many companies did not knew who was accessing the data, what was the reason to store it and if there was any value to that data. Now, I have seen an increase in understanding of which data the companies have. I have worked adapting services to the GDPR. The reality is that it is very cheap to design systems with 100% data accountability. The main problem is to adapt old systems full of technical debt where nobody knows if the data is used or not, or even how up to date it is.
GoodJokes 6y ago
They could stop being a platform for sellers AND seller. Maybe you can only pick one.
jjoonathan 6y ago
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 dodged the question because the answer would make Amazon look bad, not because Amazon is mostly innocent and just can't prove it 100%.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  That's way too simplistic since Amazon is not one person and not every person has the same morals or ethics in the company. I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. It's not a good mental abstraction for making arguments about companies.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Letting companies get away with incentivizing bad behavior and diffusing blame doesn't make for good policy. Just as companies earn the monetary rewards of their actions, they should also earn responsibility for their actions.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I didn't say it did, I said you used a bad analogy to make your point. Don't put words in my mouth to make up for your poor analogy.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. Corporations are people, my friend - Mitt Romney.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Yeah so the law is a lot more nuanced then that and just because of certain legal affordances are made, certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals. Quite the opposite, the complexity is enormous there's even an entire area of study for it "Organizational Theory".
ashtonkem 6y ago
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.
- wiredone 6y ago
  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 to stamp it out.
  - concernedctzn 6y ago
    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?
    - whyenot 6y ago
      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.
      - hevelvarik 6y ago
        Trust is too general a term to be very useful. I trust that amazon will get me my order swiftly, and that if it gets lost in transit or stolen from my front door, I will be made whole without any fuss. That is huge for them as a retailer. At the same time there are entire categories of products that I simply wont ever buy from them because I do not trust that the product is legit.
justsomeuser 6y ago
> How can you prove a negative? I think in science you cannot "prove a negative" because you cannot observe all the events in the system (the universe). But if you can observe all events in a system (Amazons data access logs) I think you can "prove a negative" by proving that the data was not accessed.
- throwaway98797 6y ago
  So employee A who should access data sees it and than tells employee B who shouldn’t. Breached and now you lied to Congress. You can’t control everything that happens in your company.
  - justsomeuser 6y ago
    Agreed, once data passes via human-human communication its not possible to observe 100%.
- steffan 6y ago
  I think it's a logical fallacy to assume you can "observe all events" in any non-trivial system, particularly where there are humans on the edges.
ponker 6y ago
It's like asking to prove that you haven't been hacked. You can't. The questioner should have been asking about access control, how many people allowed to access, rules about accessing, auditing, how audits are screened for violations, how many people have been caught for violations (if it's zero then you know you have a problem), how they were punished, etc. Of course hard to see how a Congressperson would know about any of this. Congress should be bringing in domain experts to ask these kinds of questions.
- gruez 6y ago
  Or perhaps they do know, but they're deliberately being obtuse to score some easy political points.
DSingularity 6y ago
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 used to minimize the risk of inappropriate access to this sensitive data. “ If Bezos said that wouldn’t you feel better?
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  Is it abuse for Amazon to compete with their sellers? I don't think so, it's just like Best Buy selling their own brand of TV mounts & HDMI cables and prioritizing them over other brands they carry. There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract). Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).
  - rrix2 6y ago
    > Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day). this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition. Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.
    - 6y ago
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Would the same principle apply to a tech company "privacy policy"? "We can't guarantee that policy has never been violated." Perhaps there is a way to make this guarantee: Do not collect the data to begin with.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Don't collect any sales data? That would mean no reviews or Q/A section because engagement there is a good proxy for sales. Search would also be completely broken because Amazon wouldn't know what products were good. Not to mention payment processing. How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold? Dealing with payments cannot be stateless for a number of technical and legal reasons (audits, chargebacks, accounting, etc). Amazon collecting this data is completely legitimate. Are you concerned that Best Buy knows how many third party HDMI cables they sell while also selling their own?
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist. If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. Nonsense comparison.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      > Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist. You don't think stores should exist? How do you justify that? >If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. I don't see how they are so different. Both are stores that sell third and first party items. BB even does significant online business. Care to explain?
      - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
        Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales. There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation. To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.
jariel 6y ago
"And Bezos committed to doing that.?" Why on earth would we believe him? It could be a widespread practice he's happy to overlook. I don't believe anyone in AMZN retail is looking at S3 bucket data, but I do believe they are looking at sales data from the online store, no doubt. It's not like Walmart or Walgreens isn't doing this.
objektif 6y ago
Do you have access to encrypted data? How does any company can guarantee your password is secure?
manquer 6y ago
He can certainly make that part of the contract with seller. , you would have legal recourse for breach of contract and standing to sue. It is another matter that law should be strong enough to prevent this in the first place and AMZ or any other retailer shouldn't be needed to put in the contract explicitly.
deeblering4 6y ago
> How can you prove a negative? Answering “no” while under oath would be a good start.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  You'd rather that CEOs perjure themselves?
  - eat_veggies 6y ago
    I'd rather that them saying "no" didn't mean they were perjuring themselves
    - cthalupa 6y ago
      You think anyone of any company that employs more than a small handful of people can guarantee that a company policy has never been broken? I don't see how you can guarantee this without also scrutinizing and monitoring employees to a level that would feel incredibly invasive.
      - eat_veggies 6y ago
        invasive in the same way as employees looking at customer data is invasive?
- ozten 6y ago
  Zuckerberg did what you are implying. He said what Congress wants to hear by saying Facebook's business model isn't based on Cookies. He is banking on Congress' poor track record of proving perjury and the law enforcement acting on it. Other CEOs gave truthful answers, which is ... out of 10s of thousands of data points, I can't give you a blanket yes or no without commiting perjury.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rv-de 6y ago
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.
- adamsvystun 6y ago
  There is a difference between guaranteeing that employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers, and guaranteeing that you have all the policies, access controls and punishments. It seems that Bezoz couldn't guarantee the former, while he probably can guarantee the later.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
What? No. They were asking if there were basically access controls in place and he just said there are policies.
throwaway2245 6y ago
Bezos committed to doing [none of] those things only after Amazon was called out by the US Congress and the international press seems like an extremely important distinction. Amazon hasn't been doing it (why not?), and isn't doing it (why not?), but Bezos has committed to "look into it very carefully". Great (sarcasm).
bkor 6y ago
> There's no way he could make that guarantee. But you can put various things in place. E.g. limited access, (external) audits, etc. Such things are entirely standard and expected for any big company. Saying "cannot guarantee" is too much nitpicking. Such needs (limit the access, etc) happens all the time. Say you want to takeover another (competitor) company. During that process you'll need to figure out a lot of information. However, you're competitors and you aren't allowed to do that. The common solution is to "ring fence" that team. Such "ring fencing" is a normal occurrence. Similarly, you can also educate what is allowed and what not on a regular basis. The company I work for has annual repeating courses for various basis things. Meaning, GDPR, competition law, fraud, etc. They're highly annoying and enough people try to ignore the course and go straight to the questions. It'll be difficult to pass if you didn't do it. Not doing those course will get you an email After doing all that you'll still have enough cases where people were found to have committed fraud, etc. But that's entirely different than 'cannot guarantee'. I know you went into things I said above. However, immediately saying "cannot guarantee" is too much of a technical answer. Yeah, there might be cases. But your whole response is a lot of proactive things. You also need to check after the fact, plus do more than just a policy. There is more than enough possible. Further, the question that was asked is entirely normal.
cryptica 6y ago
Regardless. If he is not capable of guaranteeing this, then clearly Amazon is too big and complex to follow the law. If a person is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, we put them in a psychiatric asylum. If a corporation is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, what should be done with them? Clearly it would be unjust to let them continue. It's already bad enough that corporations have the same rights as people, they shouldn't be exempt from having to face the consequences of their transgressions because that would put their rights above people. There are very strong ethical and economic grounds for breaking up these corporations. It merely comes down to the law. It really doesn't make sense that corporations are allowed to keep breaking the law and only get fined whereas if people keep breaking the law, they go to jail. If people were treated the same as corporations and we abolished prisons, people would form mafias and go on rampages, hunt down billionaires, seize all their assets, then use the assets that they stole to pay the fines... Clearly that doesn't make any sense, it would be total anarchy; and yet this is exactly what we allow corporations to do.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Under that definition the US is an open air insane aslyum because nobody knows all of the vast body of laws they are incapable of following them. Meanwhile abolishing all laws would make Hinkley perfectly sane. To be perfectly frank using laws as a basis for sanity isn't a sane concept in the first place. Besides while they are pissy about accessing the data it isn't /against the law/ per se. A mom and pop scale website doing the same thing wouldn't even be cared about as anti-competive. It isn't like price fixing where it is a crime in itself.
zadkey 6y ago
Shouldn't there also be access control security measures in place that prevent this kind of thing. E.G., not just anyone can look at seller data, have to have a ticket with some IT group to get limited access to a specific seller's data with a specific reason stated for the access etc.
- kchr 6y ago
  So what if you made up a reason and completed the process as required? My point being - regardless of access control the people that are allowed to actually have the data could still leak it in the end.

Barrin92 6y ago

>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=20 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!

gruez 6y ago
How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  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?
  - makoz 6y ago
    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
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      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.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Disclaimer: I also work at AWS. As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? It’s already to the point where I filter on Amazon Prime eligible and if possible sold and shipped by Amazon.
        Barrin92 6y ago
        >As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy. Point being, is there a technical argument against giving the vendor/consumer control over this, as long as the nature of the sale is transparent? I don't think so. And even if you're saying that's too free-wheeling there's point two. Keeping only a track record of the data for the return period and only making it accessible if a customer demands a refund is technically possible. The anti-competitive /privacy breaching data-processing that is the topic of the thread can be completely avoided.
        kube-system 6y ago
        >> As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? > On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy. Not at all. eBay’s money back guarantee overrides any seller policies. You can definitely return eBay items that are sold as “no returns”, if they are defective, counterfeit, etc.
      - 6y ago
  - gruez 6y ago
    And what are you going to do when the customer wants to see their purchase history? Tell them "unfortunately, we can't show your purchase history for third party sellers"? What if they want to do a refund? Even if you didn't keep purchase history for customers, Amazon would need to keep purchasing records for accounting purposes. In a multinational corporation you simply can't have money going into a black hole with no audit trail.
    - rapind 6y ago
      Store it encrypted and log access. For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels. To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example). The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet). Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves. This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).
      - gruez 6y ago
        All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".
        rapind 6y ago
        It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.
  - sitver 6y ago
    Well, taxes and accounting for starters.

noitsnot 6y ago

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

tracer4201 6y ago
This feels like hyperbole, though I hope Congress gets to the bottom of it if it’s really true. On one hand, I can see an employee who maybe has performance metrics that incentivize this behavior. Without sufficient oversight, any policy against using this data would become pointless. I can also see that Bezos wouldn’t want to make a strong claim guaranteeing it doesn’t happen. He would perjure himself if it’s occurred even once. I’m more interested to learn if it’s systemic or if it’s just outliers. One is a company incompetently benefiting from not enforcing its own policies whereas another is more egregious.
rocmcd 6y ago
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.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  This is a game for two. Politicians try to score soundbites. Businessmen try to obscure misdeeds. Amazon admitted to using aggregated seller data for competitive purposes. That's not illegal, but it should be, and congress should fix the gaps in the laws. Since Bezos doesn't want this, he dragged the conversation into the weeds (the aggregated/non-aggregated distinction and the proving-a-negative discussion). That's fine. Everyone acted in their self-interest, as expected. What confuses me is how ridiculously effective the diversions were. This thread is full of people chasing the chaff. People who ought to know better.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    > 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.

monadic2 6y ago

I mean he could mention what controls they do have to prevent this, that’d be a decent start.

salawat 6y ago
That would expose confidential trade secrets and competitive intelligence. It'd also jeopardize their internal security posture to release that information publicly. I don't buy it, but I imagine that'd be the excuse.

_acco 6y ago

The key is "access controls." The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data. Rep. Jayapal was pressing on this, and Bezos mentioned policy but never access control.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data This is easier said than done. Data exists in multiple places. It transforms in the form of reports and presentations. Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure.
- dantheman 6y ago
  I mean, can we get the politicians to say the government and it's employees aren't accessing data that they're not allowed to access/have?
- _acco 6y ago
  Hence why we are here.
  - User23 6y ago
    There's a reason basically every SDE is subject to the trading window: its impossible to give them the permissions necessary to do their jobs without also giving them access to highly sensitive information.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure. I completely agree. Before GDPR, many companies did not knew who was accessing the data, what was the reason to store it and if there was any value to that data. Now, I have seen an increase in understanding of which data the companies have. I have worked adapting services to the GDPR. The reality is that it is very cheap to design systems with 100% data accountability. The main problem is to adapt old systems full of technical debt where nobody knows if the data is used or not, or even how up to date it is.

GoodJokes 6y ago

They could stop being a platform for sellers AND seller. Maybe you can only pick one.

jjoonathan 6y ago

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 dodged the question because the answer would make Amazon look bad, not because Amazon is mostly innocent and just can't prove it 100%.

Grimm1 6y ago
That's way too simplistic since Amazon is not one person and not every person has the same morals or ethics in the company. I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. It's not a good mental abstraction for making arguments about companies.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Letting companies get away with incentivizing bad behavior and diffusing blame doesn't make for good policy. Just as companies earn the monetary rewards of their actions, they should also earn responsibility for their actions.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    I didn't say it did, I said you used a bad analogy to make your point. Don't put words in my mouth to make up for your poor analogy.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. Corporations are people, my friend - Mitt Romney.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Yeah so the law is a lot more nuanced then that and just because of certain legal affordances are made, certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals. Quite the opposite, the complexity is enormous there's even an entire area of study for it "Organizational Theory".

ashtonkem 6y ago

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.

wiredone 6y ago
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 to stamp it out.
- concernedctzn 6y ago
  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?
  - whyenot 6y ago
    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.
    - hevelvarik 6y ago
      Trust is too general a term to be very useful. I trust that amazon will get me my order swiftly, and that if it gets lost in transit or stolen from my front door, I will be made whole without any fuss. That is huge for them as a retailer. At the same time there are entire categories of products that I simply wont ever buy from them because I do not trust that the product is legit.

justsomeuser 6y ago

> How can you prove a negative? I think in science you cannot "prove a negative" because you cannot observe all the events in the system (the universe). But if you can observe all events in a system (Amazons data access logs) I think you can "prove a negative" by proving that the data was not accessed.

throwaway98797 6y ago
So employee A who should access data sees it and than tells employee B who shouldn’t. Breached and now you lied to Congress. You can’t control everything that happens in your company.
- justsomeuser 6y ago
  Agreed, once data passes via human-human communication its not possible to observe 100%.
steffan 6y ago
I think it's a logical fallacy to assume you can "observe all events" in any non-trivial system, particularly where there are humans on the edges.

ponker 6y ago

It's like asking to prove that you haven't been hacked. You can't. The questioner should have been asking about access control, how many people allowed to access, rules about accessing, auditing, how audits are screened for violations, how many people have been caught for violations (if it's zero then you know you have a problem), how they were punished, etc. Of course hard to see how a Congressperson would know about any of this. Congress should be bringing in domain experts to ask these kinds of questions.

gruez 6y ago
Or perhaps they do know, but they're deliberately being obtuse to score some easy political points.

DSingularity 6y ago

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 used to minimize the risk of inappropriate access to this sensitive data. “ If Bezos said that wouldn’t you feel better?

tehwebguy 6y ago
Is it abuse for Amazon to compete with their sellers? I don't think so, it's just like Best Buy selling their own brand of TV mounts & HDMI cables and prioritizing them over other brands they carry. There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract). Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).
- rrix2 6y ago
  > Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day). this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition. Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.
  - 6y ago

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Would the same principle apply to a tech company "privacy policy"? "We can't guarantee that policy has never been violated." Perhaps there is a way to make this guarantee: Do not collect the data to begin with.

dahfizz 6y ago
Don't collect any sales data? That would mean no reviews or Q/A section because engagement there is a good proxy for sales. Search would also be completely broken because Amazon wouldn't know what products were good. Not to mention payment processing. How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold? Dealing with payments cannot be stateless for a number of technical and legal reasons (audits, chargebacks, accounting, etc). Amazon collecting this data is completely legitimate. Are you concerned that Best Buy knows how many third party HDMI cables they sell while also selling their own?
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist. If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. Nonsense comparison.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    > Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist. You don't think stores should exist? How do you justify that? >If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. I don't see how they are so different. Both are stores that sell third and first party items. BB even does significant online business. Care to explain?
    - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
      Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales. There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation. To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.

jariel 6y ago

"And Bezos committed to doing that.?" Why on earth would we believe him? It could be a widespread practice he's happy to overlook. I don't believe anyone in AMZN retail is looking at S3 bucket data, but I do believe they are looking at sales data from the online store, no doubt. It's not like Walmart or Walgreens isn't doing this.

objektif 6y ago

Do you have access to encrypted data? How does any company can guarantee your password is secure?

manquer 6y ago

He can certainly make that part of the contract with seller. , you would have legal recourse for breach of contract and standing to sue. It is another matter that law should be strong enough to prevent this in the first place and AMZ or any other retailer shouldn't be needed to put in the contract explicitly.

deeblering4 6y ago

> How can you prove a negative? Answering “no” while under oath would be a good start.

bpodgursky 6y ago
You'd rather that CEOs perjure themselves?
- eat_veggies 6y ago
  I'd rather that them saying "no" didn't mean they were perjuring themselves
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    You think anyone of any company that employs more than a small handful of people can guarantee that a company policy has never been broken? I don't see how you can guarantee this without also scrutinizing and monitoring employees to a level that would feel incredibly invasive.
    - eat_veggies 6y ago
      invasive in the same way as employees looking at customer data is invasive?
ozten 6y ago
Zuckerberg did what you are implying. He said what Congress wants to hear by saying Facebook's business model isn't based on Cookies. He is banking on Congress' poor track record of proving perjury and the law enforcement acting on it. Other CEOs gave truthful answers, which is ... out of 10s of thousands of data points, I can't give you a blanket yes or no without commiting perjury.

deleted 6y ago

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rv-de 6y ago

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.

adamsvystun 6y ago
There is a difference between guaranteeing that employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers, and guaranteeing that you have all the policies, access controls and punishments. It seems that Bezoz couldn't guarantee the former, while he probably can guarantee the later.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

What? No. They were asking if there were basically access controls in place and he just said there are policies.

throwaway2245 6y ago

Bezos committed to doing [none of] those things only after Amazon was called out by the US Congress and the international press seems like an extremely important distinction. Amazon hasn't been doing it (why not?), and isn't doing it (why not?), but Bezos has committed to "look into it very carefully". Great (sarcasm).

bkor 6y ago

> There's no way he could make that guarantee. But you can put various things in place. E.g. limited access, (external) audits, etc. Such things are entirely standard and expected for any big company. Saying "cannot guarantee" is too much nitpicking. Such needs (limit the access, etc) happens all the time. Say you want to takeover another (competitor) company. During that process you'll need to figure out a lot of information. However, you're competitors and you aren't allowed to do that. The common solution is to "ring fence" that team. Such "ring fencing" is a normal occurrence. Similarly, you can also educate what is allowed and what not on a regular basis. The company I work for has annual repeating courses for various basis things. Meaning, GDPR, competition law, fraud, etc. They're highly annoying and enough people try to ignore the course and go straight to the questions. It'll be difficult to pass if you didn't do it. Not doing those course will get you an email After doing all that you'll still have enough cases where people were found to have committed fraud, etc. But that's entirely different than 'cannot guarantee'. I know you went into things I said above. However, immediately saying "cannot guarantee" is too much of a technical answer. Yeah, there might be cases. But your whole response is a lot of proactive things. You also need to check after the fact, plus do more than just a policy. There is more than enough possible. Further, the question that was asked is entirely normal.

cryptica 6y ago

Regardless. If he is not capable of guaranteeing this, then clearly Amazon is too big and complex to follow the law. If a person is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, we put them in a psychiatric asylum. If a corporation is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, what should be done with them? Clearly it would be unjust to let them continue. It's already bad enough that corporations have the same rights as people, they shouldn't be exempt from having to face the consequences of their transgressions because that would put their rights above people. There are very strong ethical and economic grounds for breaking up these corporations. It merely comes down to the law. It really doesn't make sense that corporations are allowed to keep breaking the law and only get fined whereas if people keep breaking the law, they go to jail. If people were treated the same as corporations and we abolished prisons, people would form mafias and go on rampages, hunt down billionaires, seize all their assets, then use the assets that they stole to pay the fines... Clearly that doesn't make any sense, it would be total anarchy; and yet this is exactly what we allow corporations to do.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Under that definition the US is an open air insane aslyum because nobody knows all of the vast body of laws they are incapable of following them. Meanwhile abolishing all laws would make Hinkley perfectly sane. To be perfectly frank using laws as a basis for sanity isn't a sane concept in the first place. Besides while they are pissy about accessing the data it isn't /against the law/ per se. A mom and pop scale website doing the same thing wouldn't even be cared about as anti-competive. It isn't like price fixing where it is a crime in itself.

zadkey 6y ago

Shouldn't there also be access control security measures in place that prevent this kind of thing. E.G., not just anyone can look at seller data, have to have a ticket with some IT group to get limited access to a specific seller's data with a specific reason stated for the access etc.

kchr 6y ago
So what if you made up a reason and completed the process as required? My point being - regardless of access control the people that are allowed to actually have the data could still leak it in the end.