Amazon lied about using seller data, lawmakers say, urging DOJ investigation
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That's pretty incredible. I'm curious what kind of data this is; knowing the nature of the data would help us understand how platform operators can abuse their position.
There are policies in place saying that you definitely can't look at the data around which third party sellers are doing well, selling lots of stuff. But also there's no auditing in place to see if you check it or not. It's all a big data warehouse and you have access to it.
And hey, you've heard everyone else is looking at this data. You're just taking a quick look to get ideas do you don't get fired. What's the harm? You'll help the company do well and won't have to polish your resume.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-...
Construct an algorithm that tells you what you want, based on the data that you're not supposed to be using, and then throw your hands up when anybody asks and say "Nobody really knows how ML models work."
Or before machine learning was an option: management consultants.
import torch
design_parameters = torch.chinesewall(existing_product_url)PMs at Amazon, even people who need visa sponsorships, have options (and probably better options). Don't defend their poor choices. Engineers at Amazon have even more options.
You mean one of the companies Amazon is driving out of business? For some reason they aren't hiring.
It follows that unethical people will this group together to commit their unethical conspiracies. See the Political parties, big oil, pharma, insurance, the fed, hedge funds, etc.
Ethical people have been self selecting out of these lucrative industries forever. What’s left are the clueless and the criminal.
Anything that is counter to a free market rewards unethical behaviors. But politicians don't need to be bought. It's just what has been tolerated. This is a great enabler and you can see this with the SEC as just one example.
Regulatory capture occurs [1] and the megacorps infiltrate. People want to get ahead and they hide behind these megacorps, many of which have unethical behavior pushed by the leadership, investors, their boss, and sometimes even condoned by in-house lawyers. If there is no risk to shareholder value and no risk of personal charges, they will do it.
We need some criminal charges levied and some extreme fines. Maybe just set the fines to equal the money they stash overseas? It HAS to grossly outweigh the economic gain from the behavior, so that it's a big hit to shareholder value. [1]
Despite the fact that managing this balance is fundamental to a capitalist society, it's extremely typical for the latter half of this balance to be ignored, for competition to be framed as an unmitigated positive, and for the Goodhart's Law side of it to be completely swept under the rug.
Culpability should be attributed both to the individual and to the system. Otherwise it's easy to construct systems that bypass responsibility. Like we see here.
Capitalism encourages screwing over other people, being cutthroat in business, etc.
Communism encourages different faults, such as passivity, mob mentalities, and not taking responsibility.
Anarchism would discourage considering the effects of 2nd-order+ consequences.
The competition knob is but one knob among many. It's the one America happens to have at about an 8.5 (and one which I dislike greatly), but I don't think this problem is unique to capitalism.
Given the levels of consolidation we've seen over the past 30 years or so, I'd say that a lack of competition also contributes to unethical behavior. In fact, the consolidation pursued by many corporations is predicated on swallowing up even potential competitors in an effort to consolidate their dominant position.
I'd say that was unethical too.
We're drifting off topic, though. If Amazon heavily incentivizes bad behavior, should they be allowed to reap the rewards and discharge the blame? Absolutely not. They're culpable.
Imagine you could get out of a robbery charge by claiming it was perpetrated by a rogue glove.
It’s a problem because the small sellers take the financial risk trying to sell a new product, then when Amazon sees it’s doing well they make the clone and get the profits.
To illsutrate my point, please take a look at the results: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
I think it indicates a deeper problem, either on how we perceive these companies, or how Amazon succeeded in making itself look like a random traditional company. I don't know the solution outside a very prominent decade lasting lawsuit we could all point at, the same way we had the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit decades before.
They can't have it both ways.
You positively need to know what your users come to click on, where they bail, what features they never use, what browsers constantly drop out at this specific part of your website, what IP uses the bot that scrapes your most costly site wide search every millisecond etc.
Sure, any of these data could be derive from more focused, pinpoint check if you knew in advance what exactly you need to know. But let's be realistic, there's no way to anticipate every single use case and only collect the minimum data needed to fulfill it.
I don't see detailed usage data collection as a critical issue as long as it isn't sold/leaked/stored for decades/misused to harm. We can come up with so many cases where it has been effectively misused, but I'd argue it's like saying kitchen knives are misused again and again to kill people and we should stop their use. It's not realistic.
Personally I don't like having to show my ID when I walk into a store and then have a guy follow me around with a clipboard writing down everything I look at, touch.. I run out of such stores which is why I deleted my Amazon account.
> Personally I don't like having to show my ID when I walk into a store and then have a guy follow me around with a clipboard writing down everything I look at, touch.. I run out of such stores which is why I deleted my Amazon account.
This...is kinda like the next frontier, with in-store camera tracking and linking it to the customer at checkout (either through the loyalty card or credit card token if applicable). We're already partially in that future IMO.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
How does this differ from say Walmart/Target/CVS etc., launching their own private branded labels?
Even they have access to all the data on the best selling products.
Amazon is a marketplace, and pays nothing to buy your products when they're offered for sale on its virtual shelves. It purports to provide an open and equal common area for companies (including itself) to sell products, yet only Amazon has access to the treasure trove of data about the behavior of consumers on its site.
This is not true for all products. Some are sold under a pay-per-scan model, where the product is owned by the supplier up until the barcode is scanned at checkout, whereupon it is immediately purchased by the store and sold to the consumer.
For other products, suppliers may also be required to accept unsold goods for a full refund of the store’s purchase price.
Stores are marketplaces too, and shelf space – particularly the valuable shelf space like end caps – is not free.
But pay-per-scan is much more common. Examples include everything from trading cards to makeup to sandwich bread. The supplier will often restock these products themselves, so the store doesn't even need to track inventory.
Walmart does this too. Newegg made the switch several years ago. Large retail outlets which do not have a "marketplace" online option are the exception rather than the rule.
Different companies do different levels of vetting, but the retail ecosystem is vastly more accessible to small-timers than it was in the 2000s.
If they instead told Congress that this is a long established retail practice, I would be more sympathetic to that argument.
If you put your products on Amazon marketplace, you are expected to join a marketplace. You don't necessarily expect for Amazon to also join the marketplace by using your data to compete against you.
Also you can use Amazon services and warehouses even for products that you do not wish to sell on Amazon website. Essentially using Amazon as a 3PL service. Again, you might not expect Amazon to use your data for their own products.
If you sell your products to Target, this isn't exactly a marketplace. This is a retail outlet. You know they can measure your sales, measure your competitor sales, etc. And you know they won't lie to you about doing it.
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.
When you apply to rent a house, you're required to provide pay stubs and salary information. The landlord can (does?) use this to know how much they can jack up your rent next lease term (my landlord raised our rent $800/month in January).
Same with insurance salespeople, car salespeople, etc. Everyone who gets access to your financial data can use it against you.
There should be a 3rd party involved -- they take your documentation and then report to the landlord/salesperson/etc. a simple "is the person qualified?" Yes or No. And then permanently destroy said documentation.
And it's a safe assumption that everybody who can also will. There's too much money involved to let the opportunity slide.
BTW: A $800/month increase is insane!
For example, the Amazon Basics guitar pedals are created by Nux pedals (the PCBs even have Nux on them).
So from what I can tell a lot of these are not ripoffs, just rebranded products. Amazon doesn't need to waste resources on manufacturing products that are already being sold on their site, but they can make deals with people that are already manufacturing those products.
With this reputational and data exposure hit revealed, exactly how much are you going to believe the same organization when they say, “we’d never violate your trust placed in our AWS services!” Keep in mind this is the same organization that gleefully says, “your margin is my opportunity”.
The way to deal with this is to arrest a whole group of Amazon execs, and offer the usual deal - the first one to make a full confession and implicate others gets off, the others get prosecuted. This is official DOJ policy.[1]
[1] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/sometimes-confession-is-go...
Corporate fines seem ineffective and almost useless , especially because these sorts of actions will often benefit the individuals undertaking them (principal agent problem). I suspect the motivation behind corporate fines is that they can be large monetary amounts, and look good for the investigator/agent/attorney.
Personal fines and no prison time just tweak the risk/reward calculation a little bit. These executives make a lot of money, and I would guess if they are the type to do illegal behavior they wouldn't mind gambling if the reward is great enough. I could even see it making this behavior more likely to happen if it's clear that they won't go to jail for illegal behavior and all they have to worry about is a fine and losing their job.
Reductio ad absurdum: Getting executed is even scarier than prison, shouldn't we 'spring for' that instead?
I think that a fine which meaningfully reduces an individual's means is possible, and preferable to using prison sentences to instill fear.
My view is that the extreme sentences provided for in legislation are causing many non-guilty people to plead to lesser offenses, which is a real problem. I also think that we shouldn't be crowding jails and prisons with people who have committed civil offenses.
What do you believe prison is for? Do you think it works?
Yes, I think there are a lot of extreme prison sentences in this country and we incarcerate way too many people. But I think it is ridiculous to be so lopsided with punishments and only put people without means in jail. White collar crimes like this one have a larger negative impact on society than some guy caught stealing a car and they should not get off with a slap on the wrist.
I don't think prison is for rehabilitation. Some humans act incredibly selfishly and if there are no consequences to bad actions, they will act selfishly and they will have a negative impact on society. Law enforcement and criminal justice is a balancing act with no perfect right answer. It is not tenable to be too far on either end of the spectrum and I think we need to try to strike that balance where crime is deterred enough but where we don't live in a police state dystopia that causes a depressed and miserable society. I don't really know where that point is, but I am all for equitable punishment of white collar criminals.
Prison time allows for disincentivizing as well as rehabilitation. Death sentence on the other hand…
Perhaps part of the problem are our prison conditions. And the minimal effort directed towards true rehabilitation. Fixing those might make prison time less ethically fraught.
Less people are willing to gamble their lives. The threat of prison is more effective than the threat of losing some money.
Since you brought it up... reductio ad absurdum: The threat of execution is even effective than prison, shouldn't we 'spring for' that instead?
As per my sibling comment:
I think that a fine which meaningfully reduces an individual's means is possible, and preferable to using prison sentences to instill fear.
My view is that the extreme sentences provided for in legislation are causing many non-guilty people to plead to lesser offenses, which is a real problem. I also think that we shouldn't be crowding jails and prisons with people who have committed civil offenses.
I think you'd have a hard time proving that capitol punishment was a more effective deterrent than prison. It doesn't seem to be one for crimes like murder (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12291).
If fines are to work they would have to meaningfully reduce an individual's standard of living and continue to enforce that. Otherwise what's to stop Amazon from having people lie to congress, get fined, and then "gift" them the money back with a heavy bonus? What's to stop Amazon's corporate buddies from hiring the liar with a massive bump and a bonus to cover the fine?
Some crimes justify "extreme sentences" and knowingly lying to congress should be one of them. I find a prison sentence far less extreme than forcing a person to a lower standard of living and preventing them from being to work for accept large amounts of money in the future.
That would also be an effective deterrent, more so than prison alone probably. Torture would be even better, especially torture of family, friends, and pets.
> My view is that the extreme sentences provided for in legislation are causing many non-guilty people to plead to lesser offenses, which is a real problem. I also think that we shouldn't be crowding jails and prisons with people who have committed civil offenses.
Everything has pros and cons. How many innocent people will plead to a lesser crime vs how much will crime be reduced by the threat of prison?
In lieu of a study to answer that, we have to rely on our experiences dealing with people. You seem to believe a criminal will be deterred by fines, but I disagree.
This isn’t the type of opinion that can be changed by arguing over the internet.
That's why I included the "... prohibition on further compensation/employment by the company/organization...".
Maybe even extend that to all government suppliers...
False.
> before then, cops and the prosecutor only need "probable cause" which is typically understood to allow that evidence may be gathered later.
No, it isn't; probable cause must be based in evidence. For cases requiring indictment, this evidence is presented to a grand jury before charges can formally be filed; for cases where the conditions allowing warrantless arrest do not apply, it occurs in the presentation of evidence to support an arrest warrant; for other cases the evaluation (by hearing or otherwise) happens generally within 48 hours of arrest, and delay to gather evidence has specifically been ruled unconstitutional.
there are a lot of details that vary state by state, but i'll say that not all charges require a grand jury, and 48 hours is clearly "later"
Is Amazon Cosa Nostra nowadays? I find it hard to believe they'd be more scared of other execs than the government..
It mostly just lacks inspiration.
This is how you get false confessions and wrongful convictions. Especially for conspiracy where burden of proof is he-said/she-said
This isn't a dope dealer growing weed in his car and having his buddies sell it for him. These sorts of operations produce a lot of paperwork. As an employee who is actually tasked with building/working with all of these systems/processess, you don't get inducted into the secret conspiracy with a nod, wink, handshake, and a secret decoder ring.
* for poor people.
It's time to set an example. This sworn testimony was knowingly false. So charge this Senior executive with lying to Congress and lay down the likelihood of prison time. Watch them flip on their other execs.
Everyone suspected they were lying, but suspicion isn't proof. If proof has emerged, it's imperative to go hard enough to make up for the many times where conservative standards of proof let obvious lies slip through.