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.
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).
Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why do you need aggregated sales data for these use cases? Presumably bad internal actors aren't going through order history records one at a time and pasting into Excel! This problem could only exist if you could query large amounts of sales records. Cynically I suspect Amazon has tooling specifically to identify lucrative products.