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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

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".
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals. Have you looked at ELon Musk, Steve Jobs and many others?
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        There are hundreds to thousands of other people below them working on hundreds of different things. If anything those 3 are great examples of what I'm talking about. Even Jobs wasn't the singular person making all the decisions, you should look into Jony Ives, Cook etc
        sumedh 6y ago
        Those hundreds to thousands of other people dont matter when the guy at the top sets the direction.
gruez 6y ago
>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).
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  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."
lemmsjid 6y ago
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, though, on what constitutes abuse (and thus an anecdote for your assertion). Amazon openly mines third party sales data to bolster its in house brands, just as Costco does with Kirkland, Walmart with Parent's Choice, Trader Joe's does with their house brand, etc.. Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.). There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists? I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms. Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Aggregating the data doesn't make it one lick less anticompetitive. Carving a distinction based on aggregation is every bit as much of a dodge as hand-wringing over proving a negative. > that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms. No kidding. > an internal investigation is warranted We agree.
- manquer 6y ago
  There is a fundamental difference in the volume of data collected by Trader Joe, Costco et al and Amazon. Costco at best knows what I bought at their store, Amazon knows a lot more than that. Just from the data they collect on the store they will know how many people compared what products with what else, what are they searching for, what is in who's shopping list, they will likely know demographics and lot more information about the buyers as well. It is not remotely the same problem between online and offline.

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".
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals. Have you looked at ELon Musk, Steve Jobs and many others?
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      There are hundreds to thousands of other people below them working on hundreds of different things. If anything those 3 are great examples of what I'm talking about. Even Jobs wasn't the singular person making all the decisions, you should look into Jony Ives, Cook etc
      - sumedh 6y ago
        Those hundreds to thousands of other people dont matter when the guy at the top sets the direction.

gruez 6y ago

>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).

jjoonathan 6y ago
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."

lemmsjid 6y ago

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, though, on what constitutes abuse (and thus an anecdote for your assertion). Amazon openly mines third party sales data to bolster its in house brands, just as Costco does with Kirkland, Walmart with Parent's Choice, Trader Joe's does with their house brand, etc.. Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.). There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists? I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms. Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Aggregating the data doesn't make it one lick less anticompetitive. Carving a distinction based on aggregation is every bit as much of a dodge as hand-wringing over proving a negative. > that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms. No kidding. > an internal investigation is warranted We agree.
manquer 6y ago
There is a fundamental difference in the volume of data collected by Trader Joe, Costco et al and Amazon. Costco at best knows what I bought at their store, Amazon knows a lot more than that. Just from the data they collect on the store they will know how many people compared what products with what else, what are they searching for, what is in who's shopping list, they will likely know demographics and lot more information about the buyers as well. It is not remotely the same problem between online and offline.