They can still figure out how to buy the items separately, and Amazon isn’t inducing suicidal ideation.
Perhaps your kids shouldn’t have unrestricted and unmonitored access to order things from Amazon? Start there, instead of insisting that Amazon do the parenting for you.
Indeed. And we intend to exercise that responsibility to safeguard our children by stopping Amazon from mixing suicide kits in with shipments of innocuous household goods.
I think we disagree on the definition of “responsibility”.
So the people who have legitimate use for those chemicals can jump through a few hoops to get them.
And Amazon, a trillion dollar company, can do a better job with its algorithms and stop recommending them and selling them to teenagers.
I am super comfortable inflicting those costs on the world.
It sounds like we won’t agree on ethical fundamentals, much less this topic, so I wish you well, and hope you can source enough bubblewrap to feel safe existing in the world.
By the way your car is not a death-trap because of us nagging the industry to do better. You are welcome!
For evidence refer to the fact that your family hasn’t died of botulism or a falling building facade.
This is pretty basic stuff. It’s not a social media panic attack it’s an active lawsuit backed by sworn statements and evidence, and the fact pattern is genuinely apalling. I get skepticism at the headline but read through the details.
It's not about parents having oversight over kids. It's about mental illness: "kits" like this shouldn't exist at all for kids or otherwise. You use it once and you're dead because that's the whole point of the combination of goods. We as a society should be past the point where we need to discuss whether selling a literal suicide kit is okay or not. It's not, and we know from research that making suicide more accessible and convenient leads to more suicide. The only outcome of allowing Amazon to do what it's doing is additional deaths that could have been prevented.
Amazon is a $1T company. They have the resources. This is willful negligence.
This is the correct way to handle it. It being a "gargantuan task" doesn't matter. Everybody would freak out if the local supermarket advertised this kind of product but somehow "tech" (read: online retailers) can get away with this because they are big?
Amazon posts billions in profits, it can certainly afford to control their algorithms. If it's impossible, then stop using algorithms and use human curation like literally every brick and mortar business.
Amazon’s recommendations are mostly crap anyways, even for mundane, straightforward stuff. They shouldn’t be recommending anything dangerous
In fact in the UK I'm not seeing any results that could be described as a "suicide kit".
The US site does seem to stock chemicals but from a quick skim I don't seem to get any sodium nitrate in the results.
It seems to me that companies massively underestimate (or willingly don’t compensate for) the importance of this newly introduced work, only cashing in on the savings from the work removed. Other examples of similar behavior include automatic moderation, which also massively fails to remove actual dangerous content.
This kind of behavior looks like greed to me, but I guess it’s legal, and needs more regulation.
According to the article, they're not doing this, and not for lack of awareness or resources. Not only have other companies like Etsy and eBay stopped selling these products years ago, but Amazon has already banned them in the UK where it's legally required. So the 'it's too complicated' excuse doesn't hold up at all.
This story is so much worse than the headline suggests, despite that seeming impossible.
If they artificially limit their "AI" from outside pressure, then they will have admitted that they can do it, and they'll get pressured to do it more and more. They don't want to deal with that, and would rather wait until a law is passed "forcing" them to do so - coincidentally Amazon will be best positioned to comply with that law and for some reason it'll only ever be used to go after smaller competitors.
They are obviously afraid of a precedent of having to answer for what they sell on their site and what happens next.
It’s understandable but no less sociopathic once understood.
This "kind" of harm seems to hide a huge amount of complexity. Let's assume the algorithm starts off on day 1 just looking for purchases that tend to appear in clusters. There's a potentially unbounded number of clusters that could be regarded as harmful. The options are surely:
1. Be vigilant and special case items one by one. I presume they are doing this. Maybe they aren't putting enough resources behind it or not reacting quickly enough but even if they were then things would always slip through.
2. Never use any kind of bundling algorithm ever.
(1) is a forever ongoing task so it doesn't sound like you're referring to that as that's not something where you can "iron out the kinks".
However it also doesn't sound like you mean (2) as you seem to be saying there's a way to fix this once and for all.
Is there a third option I haven't thought of?
EDIT - I guess maybe all "bundles" could require human curation before they are allowed to be displayed. It would be a gargantuan task but it's a valid third option.