It's been a long time since some of the congressional hearings about anti-competitive practices in the software industry, and I'm afraid I'm too tired to look u

It's been a long time since some of the congressional hearings about anti-competitive practices in the software industry, and I'm afraid I'm too tired to look up the details at the moment, but one of the items I remember from the discussion was that Amazon sales employees were allowed by company policy to look at aggregated figures (per-market, per-industry, etc) for merchants on their platform. That's fine as-is -- nothing wrong with that in principle -- but what I seem to recall employees began doing (and I can totally imagine how this would become an underground "sneaky trick" that employees would begin to learn and share with each other) was to create so-called aggregate groups that only contained a very small number of merchant businesses. That way they could claim (and perhaps keep a straight face when saying) that they were only looking at aggregate group-level figures, but the statistical reality of the situation would have been that they were looking at information about a few -- or perhaps even only one -- business.