Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

wsj.com

243 pointsikeboy154 comments

>The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks.

Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust, not just skill.

When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your employees, coupled with other coercive practices, you drastically increase the chances they will steal.

There's a reason casino cage cashiers don't make minimum wage despite it being a low skill job, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.

This is counterintelligence 101. There are four traditional motivations of insider threats (MICE):

M: Money

I: Ideology

C: Coercion

E: Ego

The thinking around that is changing, but the financial motivation is still at the top of the list.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

I think M,I,and E (hopefully not C) could also be considered motivations for convincing someone to change jobs?

(In my experience, recruiters from a well known FAANG company like to lean HEAVILY on E. Jokes on them, because the right answer is M!)

Coercion and Ego are almost never used because they aren't reliable and are fear based.

Money and Ideology are positive incentives, Coercion and Ego are generally painful incentives.

What I had in mind by Ego was "flattery", so in a positive sense. In retrospect, ego without M is an empty, impotent argument.

Or ego in the form of bait and switch offers of getting to have leadership responsibility or opportunity to heavily influence decision making about technical choices.

Hype a position up like someone has creative autonomy to lead, because it strokes their ego, then later just shrug.

You could argue that the US military uses ego very successfully. The money isn't good all things considered but it is reliable/stable. So, I think it is a mix of M and E.

Now imagine if we make universal health care and universal college education free of cost and available everywhere to everyone regardless of income. I bet military recruiters' job will become a lot harder.

This makes me wonder: why can't we use ego in civil service? I'm thinking police, firefighters, and transit workers (from the bottom all the way to top management). Because after all, if we want to reduce cost (and I hope we all do) then what's better than to reduce pay?

Please don't make a trollish username on HN. It's distracting, since the account basically trolls every thread it posts to.

We can rename the account for you if you email a better username to hn@ycombinator.com, but I've banned this account in the meantime.

Ego without additional money could be a valid argument. A lot of engineers would leave a job where nothing gets done for an equal-paying job with a lot of impact.

Coercion it used all the time. Castro would send his doctors abroad, getting them paid handsomely by aid agencies and he'd take the lion's share of their income, and he'd get away with it by holding the doctor's family de-facto ransom. The Chinese government is known to do this.

There's a missing item: 'Duty + Guilt'. Governments will use a softer form of this coercion whilst trying to imbue a sense of national duty (I guess a kind of 'ideology') upon individuals, guilting them into 'doing the right thing for their people'.

The Chinese government plays at least a small role on many Western campuses helping organize their expats, promoting their agenda etc.

That's not Coercion in this context, it's Money.

Think more along the lines of Honeypot and blackmail when you think Coercion in this sense.

It may be money for Castro, but we're talking about identifying an actor using MICE. The original poster was correct, the actor was being coerced. Don't over think it.

Heaven forbid any country vote for an elected official who this could apply to.

Don't forget that China is ultimately a far more collectivist society, and stuff like this happens all the time. The money just provides additional motivation; people's natural tendency is to share things.

i think it's more likely that people generally (anywhere) would feel little natural allegiance or loyalty to a foreign multinational corporation

Eh, how do you define collectivist? Ever tried to get on a Chinese subway or stand in a Chinese queue? I'm not sure you can compare e g. US and Chinese collectivism unidimensionally.

I'm not a sociologist but this is a fairly common distinction in sociology. Countries like Russia or China are considered to be more collectivist. For example in China they are very OK with using eminent domain to seize individual property to build rail roads. America is considered to be more individualist. We also have eminent domain here, but it's much less common to use it, (eg. see California high speed rail).

Where possible Bezos has Western employees pissing in bottles and penalized for taking sick days, working without vacations, retirement savings and health care supplemented with food stamps and tent-camps so it's pretty generous to blame Chinese culture for toxicity from the top.

Indeed, the "data leaks" that Amazon experiences in the US are people taking pictures of their working conditions and sharing them with the public.

Doing whatever it takes to get personal benefit even though it screws over others is the opposite of collectivism. As somedy who lived in China, Europe, and the US the notion of people in China being less selfish and less likely to cheat the system is just absurd.

That's not true. Selling data for their own profit is completely individualist.

So-called collectivist is just another way to say government could seize anyone's personal property without permission and compensation for 'greater good', which translates to government officials's pocket.

Collectivism can manifest itself behavior like this. I can't speak to China, but I have a lot of family that migrated away from Cuba, am a descendant of Cuban immigrants myself, and met many Cubans during my time in Florida. Those that grew up in the socialist system often have a sense that cheating is okay as long as you're cheating "The Man". Maybe these days we call it cheating "the system". Basically, stealing and fraud is more tolerated if it's stealing from some faceless group or organization, like governments or companies.

I think the distinction is shame vs guilt society if anything. Guilt is more intrinsic while shame is more external socially. China is more shame with their concept of face. Telling the customers their meal might be a bit late is loss of face even if it arrives on time. Insisting everything is fine and stalling up until it may or may not arrive is the "proper" thing to do.

Essentially that seems promotes both "do what it takes" and "do what you can get away with".

And casinos have a large security staff and I suspect do better background checks than FANG companies do.

Its the same at a large uk telco I worked at only a limited amount of people had widespread access to data and where positively vetted as well.

I know one team leader who was going to have to pass DV (TS in US terms) clearance.

> There's a reason casino cage cashiers don't make minimum wage despite it being a low skill job, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.

Not sure that is even the primary reason.

Could also be:

- Paying more attracts a higher level of employee with a more professional image (which yes matters even if someone is cashing in chips). In other words you are assuming they also don't pay the proverbial janitor a higher salary than they could get away with. After all, all else equal, if you were doing that job wouldn't you rather work in a nice building cleaning up rather than a older building or situation? Even for the same or close to low pay you were able to get elsewhere? And if this is the case why wouldn't employees still be stealing left and right. They aren't.

- Require a higher intelligence level that is more likely in a higher paid worker. That way less likely to be able to con the cashier or take advantage of them.

Also no surprise that people steal at all levels of income and in all situations. It's like when people wonder why some famous and successful person (with money) takes their own life. They say 'wow they have everything'. If that were true and a reason not to kill yourself then you'd expect people with no money to be taking their own lives left and right. And obviously that is not happening.

Then why China, and not India or other low COL areas? I don't believe it's as simple as purely salary.

Speaking as Russian, I'd speculate that China is the subject to the same effect when having collective memory of socialism when property belonged to nobody makes for a society where cheating the System (big foreign company would seem close to it) isn't that big of a vice, if any, and may be even a sign of being smart/entrepreneural.

Agreed. Amazon has a large operation in India. And FANG has had development centers there forever. Espionage is unheard of.

cos Indian suppliers aren't as big players yet. I think the Chinese suppliers care about US buyer data which is supplied from Chinese factories.

Noted, FWIW, by Adam Smith:

The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...

We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies. The value and ROI from paying people more is not well promoted enough. Decades of globalism, private equity acquisitions, and corporate competition obsessed business literature where lower prices is always revered.

But in knowledge/service based industries it's not always about shaving pennies to make businesses better and there are many chances for better returns for small salary investments.

Smith speaks to this as well, as I'd recently posted.

And to clarify, because the point is often missed: I'm not mentioning Smith because I agree with all he's written, and certainly not for what he's claimed to have said, or to suggest that Jacob Viners very tortured re-assembling of various snippets across three separate books of the work is the book's central message. Smith is verbose as hell, but can, and does, get to the point when he really wants to:

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." "A man must live by his work." "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." "[Political economy proposes] first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people...; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services."

Smith isn't the last word on economics. And he's not the first. His views, even when wrong, are almost always well-considered, and it's usually possible to learn from his mistakes. And he anticipates a verry surprisingly large number of present concerns (with a few gaping holes: mechanisation and automation are almost wholly ignored, even though Smith personally arranged for a position for James Watt at Edinborough).

He is simultaneously highly influential, greatly ignored, and tremendously misrepresented. Reading him is extremely revealing, though I'd suggest he not be thee sum total of your economic education.

But what he absolutely is not is the laissez-faire advocate of harsh market therapy for all things, and corporate apologist, he's often represented to be, by both critics and so-called advocates. Which even brief passages can make clear. His two chapters on wages particularly.

> We need a stronger culture of paying people better in our western economies.

This is more of a political issue than a cultural one. Companies always pay what they have to pay to get workers they need. The problem is we have policies that depress wages.

For example, the H1B program nominally isn't supposed to have foreign workers competing with domestic ones, but the rules are easy to game, so it does. The easy fix is to get rid of most of the other rules and just require employers to pay the government $75,000/year for each foreign worker they hire. Now it's impractical for someone under H1B to replace a US worker who makes less than six figures, but companies who legitimately can't find what they're looking for in the US workforce have the ability hire outside it -- for an extra $75,000/year on top of whatever salary they pay.

Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that. So they stay home and play video games, there is $4/hour less disposable income in the economy (the profit from which could have allowed someone else to get a raise), and the person who couldn't take the job/internship now has no experience to leverage into a higher paying job. Even if you want a minimum wage for career fast food workers, imposing one on college students and other people just starting out is likely harmful to wages on net.

There are many other examples of things like this. Companies or misguided people lobby for bad policies that depress wages and the people whose wages are being depressed aren't organized enough to stop it or even recognize the mechanisms by which it happens. Then people are more desperate for work and companies don't have to pay them as much.

It's also culture.

https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...

> In early 2005 ... Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.

> ...an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen...

That's still a policy failure -- poor enforcement/deterrence in that case rather than poor legislation, but still. And even to the extent that it is cultural, the policy informs the culture. If Eric Schmidt went to jail over that, would it happen again?

Apple at least sits on a huge pile of cash, yet Jobs colluded to steal billions from his own employees, the very folks who made the whole thing possible. You can't police that sort of sickness, it won't be healed by passing the right laws.

Laws won't work but asking nicely will?

They can't steal from you if they're in prison.

Your original statement was, "This is more of a political issue than a cultural one." I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

> I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Whether we put them in prison is the policy decision. Culture influences policy in the same way that policy influences culture, but they're not the same thing -- and there are two different cultures here. One is that of the executives making the corporate decisions, the other is that of the voters/representatives making the political decisions. They could be wicked and we could still put them in jail.

> If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

If people weren't as wicked we wouldn't need laws. If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The undesired results are created by the existence of bad laws as well as the absence of good ones.

And more to the point, it's easier to change laws than culture. What would you suggest is the best way to affect the culture of corporate executives? Not even they can easily change it without a policy change, because the culture is derived from the existing policies and the corresponding consequences. The executives who cheat and steal and don't get caught are the ones who get bonuses and promotions and end up running the largest corporations.

Culture isn't static, it evolves based on the environment -- and the biggest part of the environment we have any control over is the laws. Bad laws suppress wages and cause economic inefficiency and wealth inequality, so here we are. Half the regulations on the books were passed under the guise of taking from the top, but the people actually at the top have the resources to avoid them so what they really do in general is take from the middle. But the middle is the place we wanted the people at the bottom to get to -- so all we're doing is making it harder for them to do that while pushing the people who are already there further down.

If you want to improve the culture, get rid of the bad laws and actually enforce the good ones.

If life on Earth were simple enough that "good enough" laws were even possible (not difficult, not tricky, but possible to formulate at all even by a legislature populated by very stable geniuses), then we would not have evolved such large brains.

After all, Gödel showed that any powerful system of rules will contain inconsistencies. Even closed tautological systems like the Catholic religion contain flaws (that was the premise of the movie "Dogma": two banished angels find a loophole in God's Law and attempt to destroy the Universe) and theologians literally get to define God.

Any system of human law must be inconsistent, so we perforce rely on human judges, which means we rely on their [lack of] wickedness, i.e. their culture, and we are back where we started.

> If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked.

Meaning no disrespect, that is a proposition to which I assign a low truth value.

I read "Walden II"[1] at an impressionable age, and I thought for a long time that if we could just make the "right" laws, construct the right system, then we could easily achieve Utopia. I was too young to realize that the novel is actually "behaviorist" propaganda.[2]

My own experience of humans, and something Gandhi said, later convinced me that law, no matter how good or wise, cannot of itself make for good people. I've never been able to find the actual quote, but it was something like, "No system [of government] relieves the people under it from the burden [or obligation] of trying to be better human beings."

If prison worked to convince people to take up that burden I don't think recidivism rates would be as high as they are, eh?

So, again, I don't reject that good and just laws are a vital part of a good and just society, but I see them as a result, not a cause.

In any event, well met.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism

> Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that

I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship. The rest need enough wages to live off of.

> I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship.

Except that there are now a bunch of restrictions on unpaid internships that have caused companies to increasingly stop having them.

And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.

> The rest need enough wages to live off of.

In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more? Unless there isn't one, but in that case their alternative is having no employment, which pays even worse than $4/hour.

> And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.

Let me put it more bluntly - rich kids are the ones taking the unpaid internships. Nobody can survive off of a $4/hr internship. The $4/hr might as well be $.50 an hour.

> In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more?

They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases. Unpaid internships tend to give much better career progression - you just need to have the money to be able to survive it. Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.

> Let me put it more bluntly - rich kids are the ones taking the unpaid internships. Nobody can survive off of a $4/hr internship. The $4/hr might as well be $.50 an hour.

What you're really saying is that $4/hr might as well be zero. But it's different -- by $4/hr. There is not a brick wall separating rich kids from poor kids, it's a wide spectrum. There are lots of in between kids who could swing $4/hr but can't get away with working for free.

> They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases.

Then why are you advocating forcing them into that? If the choice was $4/hr now for $50/hr later vs. $10/hr now for $10/hr forever, how is taking away the first option supposed to help them?

> Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.

Except that the wealthy people's kids are the ones whose parents have the influence to get them a paid internship, or at least one of the few remaining unpaid ones after the others are destroyed, so all you're really doing is screwing over the people in the middle.

Or not let low-level Chinese employees have access to secrets. Apple is known for being very punitive against leakers and is very secretive. It seems to work for then.

Is this sarcasm?

Why would it be? Seems reasonable to not let low-level chinese employees access to company secrets given their track record.

This seems incredibly racist. There could be low level employees of other ethnicities or countries of origin leaking information. That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

How many Chinese companies are giving Americans access to high level permissions in their computing infrastructure?

If every country has this then China’s is the Lebron James of them.

> That’s like saying ban all muslims from entering the US due to their ‘track record’

No, it absolutely is not. That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government. Companies can, and do, decide not to give certain privileges to remote offices. It is not comparable to businesses refusing to staff certain positions or give certain responsibilities to remote offices. Furthermore, companies can require certain positions to be filled by US citizens (common practice in defense and aerospace companies).

That is explicit race-based discrimination carried out by the government

It is also racist to assert that Muslims are all of a single race. Like most religions there are followers of all ethnicities in all countries.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US citizens is not comparable to the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

the government banning Muslims from entering the country.

Which government did that then?

Apparently it was an actual policy that the current United States administration wanted to implement, but I think it got shot down by the Supreme Court or Congress for being unconstitutional. So I guess the point is that it is a genuine example of a thing that governments might want to do...

Remember that 95% of the stuff on Amazon is manufactured in China. There’s a demand in China for sensitive information that is beneficial to the folks running the factories. Sometimes for commodity products are priced pennies apart —losing a contract can put the factory out of business.

That doesn’t mean that Chinese are inherently more risky. It’s just far more likely than an employee in China is a risk for certain types of corruption than an employee in Munich or Brazil. A warehouse manager in New Jersey might be accepting bribes, but for a different reason and different impact.

Compartmentalization of data, monitoring, vetting of employees, better communication policies (particularly around the risks and monitoring), better management, keeping employees happy who have access to valuable data (financially or otherwise), etc are all things that could be done to address this.

There are plenty of jobs where people get access to high value assets without being high-wage though. It's too simple to reduce it to mere wages.

The part about "it seems to work for them" sounds sarcastic because Apple's problems with leakers have been well publicized.

It must be given https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/11/ex-apple-employee-self-d...

Similar stuff happens to Apple. 20 Apple employees or contractors were arrested for running a business selling Apple users' data.[1] There was a different incident of an Apple employee threatening to leak a user's data.[2] There's also leaked Apple product info, such as specs, datasheets, and parts.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/china-apple-pers...

[2] http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001890/apple-employee-threate...

Yeah, it’s been weeks since the last design leaked before the great reveal!

I do not think this is due to low wages. Quality of ones morality is not necessarily measured by ones wage. If one is corruptible/corrupt there’s always a price point (or some other excuse) one falls for it.

Do a minimum wage job for a few months and you'll be surprised how quickly this changes.

If everyone treats you like shit and you get a shitty wage as well... Well, a lot happens to your mind

>If one is corruptible/corrupt...

Which is pretty much everyone.

I agree somewhat but feel it better to say I dont think wage (assuming it is a living wage) is the biggest variable in moral behaviour.

Wage likely has some weighting (especially under a living standard), but I cant see how people disagree it is a big factor. If the counter point was true we would see reducing corruption as people go up the wealth scale. Whereas I feel there is a reasonable portion of lax morals at every level of wealth, and there is higher proportion of corruption the higher the level. My logic to this and why;

1) Firstly I am aware corruption and 'wealth have a negative correlation in terms of GDP per capita but would position this as, countries with less corruption get wealthier, and culture plays a huge part in corruption so to understand this you have to look within cultures and country to country comparison is not accurate in understanding wealth/corruption relationship.

2) There is always someone wealthier and if 'getting to the top' is a huge personal driver it doesn't matter whether you are in the bottom middle class or the top 5%. There is always more to go up.

3) Corruption scales, so at the lower level someone might be taking a $1k bribe, the wealthy are taking $million bribes so the desire for immoral money scales in value to the risk/reward so people dont become dissuaded as they get wealthier and it is more to do with personal morals.

4) Wealthy have more opportunity for corruption. E.g. as you go up corporate ranks you get bigger budgets/access and more autonomy in signing things off. And there is more grey in decisions for contracts awarded etc. Its a heap easier for a senior person to be corrupt than it is for a minimum wage employee.

Side point: I dont think its fair people downvoted the original comment. HN is better than voting on I disagree with you. It is a fair comment and while maybe could have been expressed more please lets not become the community of hivemind and agenda pushing. Lets have interesting conversation regardless of if it aligns with your opinion.

Thanks for a detailed reply and analysis. There’s nothing I can disagree in these since it is an attempt to explain further why we do what we do. Also replying to other comments as well, life might leave one without much choice when especially living under deprived conditions and having family. But again it’s all about choices. I think downvotes are to the tone of the comment rather than the statement itself. Fair enough.

Amazon can’t eliminate bribery with certainty only by paying more. The principle of bribery is someone exploiting greed in the weakest link to get something they want.

The Chinese sellers/brokers are also successfully bribing employees because they want the information more.

They have the manufacturing to produce the things to sell on Amazon, the cheap labor to write fake reviews, and the cheap distribution/shipping to make the sale economically viable while also low-price for buyers. This is a great scenario for Chinese sellers, and a huge advantage over many US sellers that don’t have those abilities (or have to go through a middle-man to work with Chinese production anyways). The stakes are much higher with the potential to have Amazon be Alibaba 2.0.

Increasing wages does, however, increase the consequences of getting caught. If someone stands to lose their $12,000 annual salary if they get caught, then selling user info for a couple thousand is tempting - it increases their annual income by double digits. By comparison, I think considerably fewer people would accept such a bribe if they stood to lose a $120,000 salary. This is Singapore's logic: their government officials are some of the highest paid in the world.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but I can only speak my own opinion on this matter.)

A couple factual problems with this: first, the employees that have access to this sort of data are in white collar roles, and are hardly being paid "absolute bare minimum." Second, when Amazon interviews employees, we ask about our Leadership Principles (https://www.amazon.jobs/principles), one of which actually is that leaders "Earn Trust." Trust is absolutely something we look for in employees.

Does it really matter what a company talks about when they interview employees? Prevailing culture that is shaped by what the organization rewards seems way more important.

Yeah, every company in the world wants employees that they can trust, are team players, and so on. At least, I've never seen a job spec for 'Untrustworthy, slightly shifty, loner required. Must be antisocial and lazy. Must have a University degree in science or mathematics and a current drivers license.'

If it's a prerequisite then does it really matter if it's said.

Sure, let me be a little more specific:

- We ask candidates about times that they earned trust, behaved in a trust-worthy manner in the past. - Employees in their reviews are judged in part based on how well they earn the trust of their peers, managers, etc. - Promotions happen based on demonstrating the Leadership Principles, including earning trust.

I can't speak to whether every pocket at Amazon has implemented it the way it's supposed to, nor can I say that every employee at Amazon excels at this. I would hope though that someone who reads a statement like "Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust, not just skill" understands that this is something that has been explicitly understood within Amazon for years.

In a company approaching a million employees, someone is doing something illegal/unethical every day.

At that scale it doesn’t say anything about the culture as you are observing the outer ranges of a distribution.

That’s why you build systems that don’t allow for abuse whenever possible. And when it’s not possible, you create an audit trail.

For example, I trust Google to make my individual search history difficult for employees to access, specific search results difficult to change, and confidential data difficult to access.

Google has had corrupt employee problems in the Adwords department: https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-empl...

I trust the security and audit trail on Google's engineering side. I definitely do not in other areas of the company.

Do you have any reason to have that trust? Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Had they any stringent controls in place, I feel like their PR or marketing would have communicated some of the specifics publicly.

It's oriented towards Cloud customers, but there is some information here:

https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_a...

The Data Processing Terms for google cloud also provide some details (mostly appendix 2)

https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms

You have to agree to those seperately, they are meant for GDPR compliance. GSuite has an equivalent document you can agree to too.

I think there is a widespread understanding that nosing into customer data will get you fired from Google immediately.

There was a case the other year that the media picked up so I read about it.

As for why they don't usually talk about it might be because (examples):

- they don't want people to think about how much data they have

- saying: "we punish people who abuse their positions" indirectly hints that this is happening. Why would there be such a policy if that couldn't happen?

- (guessing) aren't really the brightest ones when it comes to marketing and PR. So far they've been saved by having products thats sells themselves.

Correction: "getting caught" nosing into other people's data will get you fired. Who knows how stringent the controls are.

Former employee and it's been a few years, but for what it's worth I was actually very reassured by what I saw there in terms of internal data security. For all products I worked with or knew something about in an engineering capacity, there was no unlogged access to personal data. Access to personal data without clear, approved reasons would result in termination. The controls were extremely strong.

I'd be more concerned in Google's case about "legitimate" but still problematic uses of data: disclosure to law enforcement, crazy specific ad targeting, machine learning for military applications, etc.

We definitely have systems in place so that employees can not just randomly look at customer data, and when it is necessary it is always logged.

Even if we need to debug customer issues we would need a good reason to look at data over just metadata. There are strict requirements for what can go in logs and dashboards also as you can imagine.

> Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data.

Well I think the evidence is mostly that people aren't having their personal data leaked by Google employees isn't it?

Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly?

I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.

I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired when I worked there https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google...

I know of cases in telecoms where a couple of BT workers got 10+ years for conspiracy - provided information to a gangland hitman to murderer someone's parents.

And anecdotally in BT you would hope if you got caught for naughty shit you would rather the Local Police, The Met or The Service caught you instead of the internal security.

This part of that article is concerning:

> After the site broke the story, Google confirmed the engineer had been sacked in July after his actions were reported to the company via email.

Sounds like he was only fired after one of the victims reported him.

For enterprises, yes, with the significant caveat that some types of data look ups cannot be communicated to the customer because they're at the request of the government.

> Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their dat

For Google Cloud, we have access transparency logs which let you see when and why your data was accessed.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/access-transpare...

You left out a key bit of information: It's for Google Cloud customers with Platinum or Gold support.

Most GMail and Google Drive users can't see the access transparency logs.

You're right, Access Transparency is specifically for enterprise GCP customers (at least currently).

Well, plenty of data gets stolen all the time. Would be tough to trace it necessarily to a Google employee.

But if you say so, anonymous internet user, it must be true. (just kidding, sort of. I appreciate the info. But absent a neutral 3rd party audit, we're all just wishing and hoping.)

These things are usually audited by third parties. E&Y or PWC or Deloitte or etc.

For some strange reason that I can’t put my finger on, as creepy as I think Google’s whole business model is an the amount of data they track especially for Android users, I still trust them not to let any random employee to access customer data.

It makes sense in theory, but it’s also a short road away from mass employee surveillance when trying to keep watch over hundreds of thousands of employees to attempt to eliminate any potential outlier risks.

This seems like a great way to give a free pass to any corporate behavior, anywhere.

Megacorp is harvesting organs and murdering people? Who cares just look at it statistically, it's only four people on the harvest team. Statistically speaking Megacorp is the most well behaved of them all!

Stop trying to look at everything through the prism of distributions, it's a bad tool in many scenarios.

Consulting the internet it looks like they have 560,000 employees.. which is quite a lot, but only halfway to a million.

Technically you could say any company is "approaching a million employees".. some just slower than others.

The statement is true, but it's innacurate and misleading.

This principally is for Amazon China and not the US where despite years of complaints Amazon has done little to visibly counter the same effects and issues.

To wit: "In exchange for payments ranging from roughly $80 to more than $2,000, brokers for Amazon employees in Shenzhen are offering internal sales metrics and reviewers’ email addresses, as well as a service to delete negative reviews and restore banned Amazon accounts, the people said."

While not holding my breath, I hope amazon USA will take its issues in the US seriously and mitigate fake reviews and the issue with comingling bad and good inventories.

Why is this downvoted? Why does HN jump to conclusions and generalities when it comes to big corps?

Shouldn't there just be a law stating that doing such things as deleting negative reviews is fraud?

A problem is many reviews are for a lack of a better term, unrigorous. Some are outright wrong (unrelated to item), vengeful (maybe comes up short, competitor), and of course astroturfing.

So basically they are a signal, and bad actors act in bad faith, but there are also just people who don’t review properly or who don’t add context to their reviews.

A more thorough system would be a bit more expensive. Gor example allowing either subject or reviewer a right to appeal to an arbiter, etc.,

What about fraudulent negative reviews?

They will probably come down hard on someone selling sales metrics etc (assuming it is happening in the US), but probably leave the fake reviews etc alone. It is just business - anything that isn't a big enough problem (yet) for their bottom line, why would they care to change it? On the other hand, selling sales metrics etc is serious (Amazon almost never releases raw numbers, for example, sales of Kindle readers) enough for them to take action

If the customers lose trust in the review system that is a big hit. Maybe Amazon thinks they are entrenched enough that it doesn't matter though.

That's how Costco survives and prospers in Amazon era.

By not exposing customers to shady vendors, misleading metrics and questionable product rankings based on fake reviews.

Yes but Costco only has a specific set of things that I'm looking for, sometimes in too high quantities and at a price point that is not particularly amazing

Yes but Costco only has a specific set of things that I'm looking for

I think, as a society, we're going to have to get away from the notion that buying everything in one place is the ideal.

We distribute computing, diversify investments, and decentralize everything from government offices to manufacturing. I think a certain amount of decentralization in shopping is OK if it means I don't have to deal with Amazon's counterfeit products, fake reviews, and conmen.

If I have to go back to the days of buying my groceries at the grocery store, my hardware at the hardware store, and my computers at the computer store, I'm OK with that.

I travel out of my way to go to a real butcher where I can see the cows going in the back of the building, and the results in the cold case in front. I know the meat hasn't been frozen (coughWhole Foodscough), isn't in storage so long it has to be pumped full of gas to keep its color, and if I want exactly six ounces of something, I watch the guy cut it fresh right in front of my eyes.

He's also an asshole, but I'd rather deal with his attitude than the perils, known and unknown, of a retail experience 100% controlled by an algorithm with no pride or ethics.

Is it perhaps possible that your priorities might not find a reflection in all hearts?

Many people do not regard the time, energy, and resources that go into the logistics of managing many vendors to be good investments for them. This can be compared to distributed computing, somewhat distributed manufacturing, distributed government, and diversified financial portfolios. Each of the items you so correctly, wisely, and rightly point to comes with significant cost efficiencies and significant energy in reducing any inefficiencies introduced.

I know a great many people who appreciate very high-quality meat of the sort you describe. The number who are willing to invest significantly into the personal logistics required to obtain it could potentially be a somewhat smaller number. To say nothing of the price premium generally demanded by such a specialist, or the impact this might have on household budgets with limited flexibility.

It's worth thinking about why department stores might have became popular, long ago, displacing a series of highly specialized expert vendors. It's perhaps even possible that an analogy of a distributed computer system might lead a lesser intellect than yours astray.

Many people do not regard the time, energy, and resources that go into the logistics of managing many vendors to be good investments for them

I don't disagree with this at all. I was one of those people for many years. But more and more I'm not that person anymore.

I don't think it's a good thing that one method (the all-centralized Amazon/Wal-Mart/Costco/Meijer hypermarket) be elevated to the status that it has, where it's seen as the epitome of retail evolution. It has been allowed to destroy other forms of retail because it uses euphemisms like "disrupt" instead of "destroy" and "value added" instead of "predatory." It pretends to be a tech company and not a retailer that's really really good and developing and implementing technology.

Just because the Amazon monster is wanted by a certain group of people doesn't mean that the other methods don't have value. That's why there's such a movement among hipsters (are they still a thing?) and others to shun the mass market in favor of more thoughtful methonds, online or otherwise.

I think Amazon is great, and I still use it on occasion, but we shouldn't deify a business model. As you noted, department stores were once the fashionable thing. One day Amazon's methods will also seem passé.

Is it perhaps possible that Amazon has been so very successful because they have indeed added value by reducing the personal logistics required of a great many people? Coupling that with equivalent or better prices is a substantial addition of value, rather than predatory, in the eyes of many.

From personal experiences, I do not view taking the time out of my day to go to the household goods store for toilet paper, paying 10% more than Amazon charges, and transporting it home to be of greater value than Amazon's offering. Of course, there are exceptional scenarios where this might shift (e.g., out of toilet paper), but I expect a great many people would agree with my approach. I understand you and some others may prefer to pay extra in both money and time with your local generic housewares vendor.

You're absolutely right that other approaches have value to some people. It may be worth considering that not all people are likely to agree with the status-seeking behavior patterns of the hipsters, even when they take the form of favoring things purportedly thoughtful.

And obviously - so obviously I thought it never needed to be said by anyone - no business model should ever be deified. We do seem to be at a local maximum in some ways, that's all.

Incidentally, where would you draw the line between "tech company" and "company that's really, really good at developing, deploying, and gaining economic efficiencies from technology"?

I fully agree with your sentiment, but...

The trouble with taking shopping back to brick and mortar is that half the best stores, and especially the eclectic specialists that had the interesting and quality things, have closed down over the last 10 years. Leaving many areas with little more than basics and discount chains. In good part thanks to Amazon and the rise of online. Five or more years after it closed I still haven't been able to fully replace the local hardware store, offline or on.

There's an awful lot more charity shops because the landlords struggle to rent all the retail units, far more betting shops everywhere, but very few new shops opening to fill the gaps.

Meanwhile Amazon isn't a patch on what it was before the rise of marketplace.

Backing out of everything at Amazon could prove difficult.

Backing out of everything at Amazon could prove difficult.

You are absolutely right. But this is a problem that was solved once before. It was plain old "mail order."

What Amazon built is an amazing logistics platform. But it got polluted by individual sellers and fly-by-night operations. Imagine ordering from a Sears catalog and not knowing if what you ordered is genuine or not.

If Amazon, or some other company, put together a platform that leverages modern-day logistics for small businesses, it would be a massive boost to the quality of what we buy, the variety of what we buy, and the small business economy.

Think of it as 21st-century mail order. Except instead of Amazon monopolizing the front end with an enormous shopping web site filled with garbage, it allows individual shops to use their own web sites on the front, and Amazon's distribution on the back end.

Amazon can keep the bulk of the crap on the front side and continue to co-mingle counterfeit garbage with quality merchandise. But at the same time allow individual merchants the ability to piggy back on its distribution.

And if Amazon doesn't want to do it, maybe FedEx or UPS, or some other company. I see lots of ads about "What can Brown do for you?" and a lot of promises. But I've never seen a company offer Amazon-class logistics that work.

If I can order a real item by phone, text, web, or whatever comes next from a small shop in Portland, Oregon and have it arrive from that store in the next day or two, I would certainly choose that over taking a chance going to a massive web site and getting a cheap knockoff drop-shipped from China.

You know, re-reading that, I'm not entire sure what I'm on about. It makes sense in my head, but doesn't seem to translate well to text. I guess I'm just disappointed that the internet was supposed to free us from the tyranny of a few large companies deciding what we can buy, and we've let the same thing happen all over again. All we done is change the names from Macy's to Amazon, Sears to eBay, and Wal-Mart to... Wal-Mart.

Well. I think I get the gist from that. Let's see if it's the one intended :)

"Imagine ordering from a Sears catalog and not knowing if what you ordered is genuine or not."

There's the thing. That would mean they'd failed, and someone in their buying department may get yelled at. They'd feel it was their reputation hurt even if it was someone else's fake. On the high street it's the same unless you go to markets or "sub-prime" independents.

Amazon seem to feel their brand is entirely separate from the people selling crap on their platform. I think they're very mistaken, and are in for a rude awakening if they keep it up.

Amazon could have taken marketplace in a different direction when they started it and kept much of their early reputation. Simply by doing enough of the buying checks the traditional sector did to ensure legitimate sellers and baseline quality. It'd cost a little more in staff and time, but would probably pay for itself in fewer returns, refunds and complaints. Marketplace could have been for products that meet Amazon's standards, rather than Amazon, the store with no standards, but fast refunds. Limit it to "enough" choice, lose the counterfeiters friend of co-mingling etc.

I'm disappointed someone else hasn't tried to do this, even if at a smaller scale than Amazon. Etsy, ebay etc leaves it all to the sellers and ratings. Price isn't everything.

No one benefits except the garbage sellers from 30 copy "brands" of every product, and crap promoted in every search. Most with fake reviews, terrible quality, short life, and no chance of warranty service.

Someone should disrupt them, but given how large and pervasive Amazon are, they'd better have deep pockets.

So, like ordering FBA, which is in an Amazon warehouse and therefore can't be shipped from China?

FBA doesn't stop the co-mingling with Chinese fakes.

No, but it cuts down on most of it and at least guarantees a physical unit is in the US ready to ship quickly.

> I travel out of my way to go to a real butcher where I can see the cows going in the back of the building, and the results in the cold case in front. I know the meat hasn't been frozen (coughWhole Foodscough), isn't in storage so long it has to be pumped full of gas to keep its color, and if I want exactly six ounces of something, I watch the guy cut it fresh right in front of my eyes.

It is truly a great privilege to be able to do that. I have neither the time nor the ability to go to a real butcher so I will keep buying from Whole Foods (or other local organic markets), tyvm

I find most of their standard bulk items to be consistently cheaper. Or if not cheaper, of significantly better quality.

Toilet paper, for example, is usually cheaper and when it isn't, the quality of what I might find on sale is hit or miss.

But the biggest draw is the Kirkland label. I'm almost always pleased with the quality for the price. And it's essentially brand name products in different packaging.

You can buy a box of Enfamil baby formula for $38 or get Kirkland brand in the same container but with a Kirkland sticker, and made by Enfamil, for $18.

Amazon is emulating this model with the Amazon Basics brand. But I'm yet to be impressed by the quality or price.

The only thing that makes my shy away from Kirkland brand - is their urge to put “Kirkland” label on good wines and expensive single malt scotches.

I mean - just keep certain things look as pure as you can, don’t plaster new label on top of everything.

I'm sure that putting their label on it is required in order to sell it cheaper than MSRP. Sort of like how hotwire can sell you a hotel for cheap, but they can't advertise the name of the hotel with the price, because that would devalue the hotel brand.

Premium brands have come to the realization, that no matter what, cheaper alternatives will compete. So why not try to capture the lower end of the market as well? A store brand lets you have your cake and eat it too.

> at a price point that is not particularly amazing

This is a fitting description for most Amazon products today. It's a good deal at all. It's conveniant because they have a good delivery platform but Amazon prices are seldom the bests.

> That's how Costco survives and prospers in Amazon era.

Target, as well. Their shipping and packaging is not on par with Amazon yet, but you always receive the product you paid for.

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/amazon-investigates-employe...

That redirect site is priceless.

Well, no, since just subscribing to the WSJ is only $10 a month, it's far from priceless.

Although you pay a privacy hit (facebook gets it) this one (https://outline.com/AsPP9t) not so much. And of course Blendle.com for when you are willing to pay to read one article in the WSJ but don't want to subscribe.

Didn't work for me

https://github.com/arthurpham/wsjUnblock

http://archive.is/nhMMI

Not surprising, here's a scenario: It's 2007. A poker company, a credit card aff site or a lawyer referral service offers $250K cash to a Google Search employee for tips on how to rank #1 for their top keywords. Even $1 Million if it lasts for x months. All you need is b*lls, er audacity, which exists in certain pockets, and a little time to find a connection. I think they would be takers. Ranking on top would be worth (back then at least) tens of millions so why not share the FU money?

I've been wondering why this doesn't happen more often now that the crypto game has figured out international payments.

The smarmy answer would be "because it's working".

Probably because crypto is only useful insofar as it can be converted into useful fiat currencies, which means that it can be tracked.

Tons of bullion exchanges will allow you to buy precious metals with cryptocoin. How trackable is it if someone uses a new wallet for each transaction, and has their gold bars shipped to model homes and abandoned property within ~25-50 miles of their location?

If you're speaking in absolutes, you're not using your imagination!

I can think of tons of schemes to anonymously extract real world spending power from crypto coins..

None of those are particularly expedient, but you have a point.

Crypto, the not-so-fast bullion-based international payment system. Perhaps the perpetrators might have better luck sending each other USD notes by mail instead.

Well, by doing that you go from maybe breaking an NDA to mail fraud, but w/e.

On a some what related note, I read that google allows people to read my email. Google itself, and third parties.

I've got friends who store important authentication, financial, and legal information in their emails.

Makes me wonder about some of the btc thefts where the vector was never determined, and the victim was fairly competent.

If you read that original WSJ article, Google allows companies to access your email if you give them access to your email. As in, if you install e.g. Kiwi [1] and agree to let them manage your inbox, then they have API keys that they could use to read your emails. Sometimes users just give their username/password to the 3rd party.

But, like I said when the original story came out, those headline writers really know what they're doing. "Google allows 3rd parties to read emails" directly implies your incorrect interpretation. Like, even on the original article, people who hadn't read it were expressing shock in the comment section that their personal emails were being read by Google engineers.

[1] https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/

> Amazon has worked hard to stop sellers from gaming its systems, but it can sometimes be a Whac-A-Mole situation as swindlers get more creative

This is true in all security problems.

I was puzzled this week when I received an email offering me $30 to delete an accurate, but negative review I posted a few weeks ago. I also received yet another counterfeit item recently. Retailers should be happy about the rate at which Amazon is squandering trust.

Wait, think twice? When the bounty is $30 apiece? I'm going to go write me a minivan

This sounds interesting, does someone have a non-paywalled source?

Sure: https://outline.com/AsPP9t

Click on 'web' underneath the title.

> casino cage cashiers don't make minimum wage

They actually do. Google it. It's below minimum.

How can it possibly be below minimum?

I found no evidence they are paid less than minimum wage, but I did find some claims casino-goers in the US are expected to tip cashiers, so perhaps the assumption is they are paid a tipped minimum wage instead of a regular one? That is not how jobs seem to be advertised though.

I’m no high roller, nor even much of a casino customer anymore, but having cashed in many tens of thousands of dollars of chips it would have never occurred to me to tip a cage cashier. They seem so disinterested in the fact that I’m standing there, it is not like they’re trying for tips. Nor have I even heard it mentioned. Now, I’m not a complete rube as I tip table and wait staff (heavily, if I’ve won big). But the person doing what I expect a casino to do: exchange their fake money for fiat? Never.

That is absolutely not true about tipping cashiers. I would disregard whatever source claimed that.

This is not below minimum wage:

The average Cage Cashier - Casino salary in the United States is $30,943 as of September 01, 2018, but the range typically falls between $25,713 and $39,285.

Source: Salary for Cage Cashier - Casino | Salary.com

I personally know more than one person who has worked in the cage, they are paid above minimum wage. It's not a great salary or anything, but it's not minimum wage or below. The $30,000/year that a sibling comment says sounds right. The BLS considers them "financial clerks" and doesn't break out casino employees separately[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/mo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com