Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.).
There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists?
I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.
Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.
A grocer can get away with whitelabeling, because the manufacturer of the product is bought from as a supplier. Therefore every brand/product in the store, regardless of the manufacturer or "brand" is essentially the grocer's product. In that sense what grocer's are doing is more inventory management. None of their suppliers are "harmed" by that in house data processing.
Amazon, on the other hand, is fundamentally harming the members of it's marketplace because they never make a purchase to prop up other members of the marketplace. Instead, they use those marketplace actors in order to target high return corners of the market in which to compete without taking any of the risk; and crucially, without also making aggregate data available to all sellers.
In effect, every Amazon seller is a risk sink. Everyone else suffers the downsides of poor market fit, but if there's a sector with good profitability, you can bet that Amazon is on it as soon as possible with a brand new Amazon Basics offering. Essentially leveraging their scale to extract as much retail volume out of the market for themselves at everyone else's expense.
Dismissing this looking at seller data due to it being aggregated is like marketing one's tobacco as toasted. You're drawing attention to something irrelevant in the hopes that no one keeps going down the path that leads them to realize you're abusing your advantaged position to the detriment of everyone else involved.
> that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.
No kidding.
> an internal investigation is warranted
We agree.
Costco at best knows what I bought at their store, Amazon knows a lot more than that. Just from the data they collect on the store they will know how many people compared what products with what else, what are they searching for, what is in who's shopping list, they will likely know demographics and lot more information about the buyers as well.
It is not remotely the same problem between online and offline.
It's not a binary offline / online business. Retailers are a mix of both, with some, like Walmart, quickly expanding their online presence as well.
How do we make companies follow it is different issue altogether . First step is the make liability exposure high for violating (like COPA ?) and provide consumes right to access what they have on you.
There is no technical way privacy of this or any other kind can be guaranteed, companies internal controls are always going to be opaque and data collection looking from the interfaces we can audit may not visible .
We can only make it higher risk legally and give consumers frameworks to make it easier to expose violations
Aggregate data on what consumers bought from the retailer. This is the retailer's data.
Individual sales data from sellers of the retailer's platform. This should be PII and treated like any other sensitive data.
Aggregate data on what consumers bought from all sellers on the retailer's platform. This is the retailer's data.
Individual data on consumer actions on the retailer's platform prior to purchasing an item. This can / should be PII. This includes search history, shopping cart, listings visited, etc.
Aggregate data on consumer actions on the retailer's platform prior to purchasing an item. This is the retailer's data.
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My position is it's unreasonable to ask retailers to limit their use of aggregated, anonymized data. And unless you limit that use, it doesn't materially change the current situation. The major difference between Walmart, Costco and Amazon is Amazon has a lot more aggregate data.
Isn't there a saying for this? "the plural of anecdote is not data"?
This reminds me of the meme that facebook/google is listening in on you without you knowing it, the evidence for which is mountains of anecdotes of people claiming that [product] showed up on their ads shortly after them talking about [product], despite them never expressing an interest in [product] to facebook/google. Despite the mountains of evidence, no one was able to provide a shred of solid evidence of the fact (eg. decompiled binary, network capture, runtime analysis).
A self-serving non-answer is even less reliable than a pile of anecdotes. It would be utterly ridiculous to elevate this one to the dignity of "data."
Corporations are people, my friend - Mitt Romney.
Quite the opposite, the complexity is enormous there's even an entire area of study for it "Organizational Theory".
Have you looked at ELon Musk, Steve Jobs and many others?
Just as companies earn the monetary rewards of their actions, they should also earn responsibility for their actions.
Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject all pointing to Amazon openly and intentionally mining third party sales data, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that Bezos dodged the question because the answer would make Amazon look bad, not because Amazon is mostly innocent and just can't prove it 100%.