Amazon and Data Privacy
April 27, 2020
Some people are snoops. I was in Sarande, Albania. The only Internet café open featured a dozen computers and so-so bandwidth. Three young men were busy duplicating US DVDs of motion pictures. I know because I stood next to the group and asked, “What are you doing?”
There was one other person in the storefront. That individual kept peering around the side of his plywood divider to check up on me and what the young men were doing.
Yep, a natural born snoop.
Why’s this relevant?
In a big operation like Amazon, there will be snoops. Some will be following the protein pulses of their DNA and others are doing what someone thought was [a] cool, [b] their job, or [c] no big deal.
I thought about Albania when I read “Amazon Tapped Sellers’ Data to Launch Competing Products.” (Page A1 and A9 in the dead tree edition of the WSJ on April 24, 2020, and at this link online.) My mind works in unusual ways: Albania and Amazon. Hmmm.
I noted:
Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on the company’s platform to develop competing products, a practice at odds with the company’s stated policies.
That strikes me as a statement of fact, not an “allegedly” needed.
Okay, based on the Albania experience, there are people who ask questions directly and there are snoops. But what’s Amazon’s source? I asked the question in Albania, and I directly observed the snoop’s peeking.
The source of the factoid is:
Interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private label business and documents reviewed by the Wall Street journal
How many employees? Who were these people? Why are they no longer working at Amazon? What documents “were reviewed”? Why not include images of these documents?
What’s going on is that a damning story lacks information I could use to verify the factoid.
I think that snoops exist at Amazon. I think that data seeps. I don’t feel comfortable with this type of behavior, but the behavior exists in Albania to Zimbabwe (yep, I have seen some interesting data behaviors there too, including violent acts for the purpose of seizing another person’s farm). A to Z of data snooping I suppose.
Nevertheless, the core of the direct statement about Amazon’s misbehavior rests upon anonymous sources of information.
Sure, the WSJ researchers and journalists reviewed online information about Amazon’s alleged activities. “Experts” were quoted but statements like this come from unnamed sources:
“We would work backwards in terms of the pricing,” said one of the people who used to obtain third party data.
The reliance on anonymous sources opens the door to making up or tweaking a comment to make it better is troubling.
Which is better? Snooping or hiding behind anonymous sources.
Both are bad; neither makes me comfortable.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2020
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