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.
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.