How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.

encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?

And what are you going to do when the customer wants to see their purchase history? Tell them "unfortunately, we can't show your purchase history for third party sellers"? What if they want to do a refund?

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.

Store it encrypted and log access.

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).

All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".

It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.

You do all this. Then someone asks you whether you can promise that Amazon employees don't access the data. You are unable to promise it. The newspaper headline reads: "Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data".

Yes it's a pretty bullshit article title. I am concerned over the access to aggregated sales data though by people who will be involved in product development. It's similar to insider trading, and requires real enforcement of "policy" with 3rd party review IMO.

Disclaimer work at AWS.

Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product

Two options. Don't offer those services for third party vendors that don't want to hand their data to Amazon and tell the customers it's between them and the vendor, which seems like a reasonable trade-off.

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.

Disclaimer: I also work at AWS.

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.

>As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy?

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.

>> As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy?

> 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.

Option 1 simply won't work for customers. If a customer is buying something from the Amazon.com website they should expect to be able to get answers about it from Amazon. If a customer was defrauded or didn't get their product etc., Amazon should not be allowed to throw up their hands and say "I don't know what you're talking about."

I don’t think this is legally possible, since Amazon is the merchant of record. That implies all sorts of reporting and retention requirements (for taxes, anti-money laundering, etc.).

How is this relevant?

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.

Well, taxes and accounting for starters.