Amazon adsystem being, inevitably, one of the many 3rd-party scripts dwelling on the linked page.

I'm somewhat curious if this post will be a Parsimon bat-signal, and also hope she hasn't ended up in the weeds dealing with the kind of things described in the article.

Thanks, NickS! A fascinating and terrifying article.

Parallel with Facebook and Twitter in that the internal grievance processes are far too opaque vs. their impact.

And a comparable market-power-based defect, but longer-standing and arguably hurting more people more directly, is health insurance appeals processes, which have been greater-regulated but not nearly to the point of adequacy. (And the government piggybacks on that bad process: commonly, state and federal regulators have policies requiring the insured to exhaust internal processes before they will help.)

Both tech and insurance definitely need more aggressive regulation to hold them to actual standards, if they're to continue as private entities.

It is very interesting. I think the 'quasi-judicial' aspect is the key insight. I'm not familiar with Amazon from either end, but on the face of it looks like a banned analogy.
A city (Amazon) builds a high street (Amazon search results). Private developers buy lots, build shopfronts (Amazon seller accounts), and rent them to businesses (Amazon is the landlord; SEO consultants might be a bit like developers).
The nature of the shopfronts is governed by building codes and zoning laws; possession of individual shops is governed by contracts between businesses and landlords; relations between businesses and customers are governed by a host of laws, depending on what is sold.
In a modern society, all this governance is carried out by state agencies (and semi-public standards bodies).
Amazon though, sounds more like a crude pre-modern state: it builds a wall around a market town and charges tolls at the gate*; it doesn't care what happens inside the walls, as long as people keep coming to market. Any state though has some interest in public order: if one's market town is a maelstrom of gang warfare, rotting garbage, and burning buildings, there won't be many visitors to tax. As the OP points out, Amazon keeps the mayhem of its market hidden from the final customer and so lacks that incentive. Amazon relies almost entirely on customer feedback for enforcement, where a state does mostly proactive enforcement (inspections, licensing, education - which benefit from transparent regulations). Amazon presumably sees enforcement simply as a cost center; but in real life rule of law enables more productive economies.
And ISTM that regulation could actually be made into a profit center in itself: Amazon guarantees trustworthiness of seller, seller gets more custom. Does Amazon offer services like that? My impression of the company is that it actually has a long-term mindset, and fixing its internal market strikes me as a good long-term investment.
*Actually more like a sales tax? It's an analogy.

5: I don't think banned analogies are essential to the concept. Whether it's internal grievance processes or public judicial processes, when lots of parties are working together, they benefit from transparent and predictable rulesets. Dominant market participants have the luxury to not provide such a framework; maybe it benefits them (by incurring less direct costs, or also indirectly, in conditioning their partners not to expect to have any negotiating power) or maybe it hurts them in the long run, but it certainly hurts the public at large.

6: I think Amazon is different from the cases in 4 in that it has created a market for third parties, and only half-assedly regulates it. But otherwise comity.

5: Amazon clearly sees enforcement as ensuring more productive economies, it's just they try to do it in an automated fashion. For all we know 99% of the time the algorithms do the right thing -- it's just they fail in a inhumane fashion that shocks the conscience.

6: There is a downside to clear rules, though -- then they can be gamed. You can see that in the fake five-star reviews rule. As soon as people figured out that was a rule, they were able to game it.

For all we know 99% of the time the algorithms do the right thing -- it's just they fail in a inhumane fashion that shocks the conscience.

Right. Judging by the prevalence of spam, it's likely that the vast majority of things that look like shoddy frauds are, and it's simplest to just kick them off the sytem as quickly as possible.

There is a downside to clear rules, though -- then they can be gamed.

Yes. Perhaps what's needed is a clear process of escalation which will involve more human decision-making time and attention as something escalates. The obvious challenge of that are (1) who pays for the human time and attention, and how does that get budgeted, (2) is process conceived as an adversarial system of judgement (like the courts) or an administrative one and either way what safeguards due process (3) who has the right to escalate. As the case of stolen identity excerpted in the OP shows, it's not always obvious who is the injured party.

The article makes me think that Amazon has put significantly more time and energy into figuring out the answers to those question than, say, Facebook, but that they're still a long ways from having a transparent process.

. . . it's likely that the vast majority of things that look like shoddy frauds are, and it's simplest to just kick them off the sytem as quickly as possible.

Having just said that, it raises an additional question, which is what metric does one use to asses the rates of false negatives/positives. Is it percentage of cases or is it percentage of cases weighted by the seller's size/income. If they get 99 out of 100 cases correct, and that means that they quickly deal with 99 people who were selling less than $2K/month, and mess up with somebody selling $40K/month, does that count as 90% success rate or 50% success rate?

It's a 72% success rate.

I decided that "under $2K" averaged as $400. It made the math easier and isn't an unreasonable estimate.

I pulled a plausible number out of my ass.

71.947%. I prefer to pull numbers out of my ass to five digits of precision.

The Amazon Kindle shop has a hell of a racket going. If you want to get sales for your e-book, you need to plow all your revenue into paying Amazon to promote it in their shop. And, if you don't, you're book will be squeezed out of the search results by the other books that do. And this is after you pay them ~30% off the top of every sale.

But what are you going to do, take your e-book to other platforms? There are no other platforms! None that matter, anyway.

Thanks. That hurts.

Yes, lots of sociopaths out there. When people complain (often justifiably) about voluminous government regulations, this is why they exist, (I'm a regulator, myself.) Of course, the the sociopaths are often the loudest complainers.

Regulators. Ride.

18: I think getting Charlie Sheen involved in the process would be a step down from the current system, imperfect as it is.

The whole Jeff letter thing really reminded me of the origin of the courts of chancery. Want justice when the system fails? Go to Jeff. You just better not have unclean hands. Will Amazon develop its own set of maxims of equity? How could it not? Amazon certainly won't complete an imperfect gift. On the other hand, Amazon doesn't seem to abhor a forfeiture.

||

These bog-corpses, variously interpreted as burials, executions or sacrificial offerings to a (usually feminised) earth deity, have since found wider fame through the writings of the serendipitously named Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob

||

Then that man [the minister] spoke in church.... 'This place has come to be a good one. Let us all desist from spearing one another.

I'm somewhat curious if this post will be a Parsimon bat-signal

It was. Luckily the used book market on Amazon is mostly free from the kinds of shenanigans described in the article. Now that I've actually read the whole (long!) Verge piece, well -- a pretty good overview of the kind of madhouse Amazon has been behind the scenes for a decade or more now. The article's a little glib at points; for example, there are more than two types of sellers on Amazon. (It's a tad insulting to suppose that there are iffy resellers and legit small businesses, and that's it. There are, ahem, legit used book (re)sellers too. For that matter, there's a large swathe of fake listers: Amazon sellers who have no products whatsoever in their own right, but list millions of items on Amazon and then have them sent (dropshipped) to the buyer from eBay or elsewhere. It's a phenomenon an awful lot of people can't seem to wrap their heads around -- whatcha mean, they don't actually have any of this stuff they're advertising? These are a particular bane in the used book world.)

I feel like we're due for a Friday WTFuckery thread. It's Friday, and there's plenty of WTF going on.

Sorry to stomp on parsi's comment, but the thread was dead until then.

What's been most remarkable to me is the extent to which Amazon has bred an entire ecosystem of spin-off consultants, everything from people promising to raise your products in Amazon's search results (like SEO consultants, but specifically for Amazon), to 'Amazon lawyers' who will help reinstate you after a suspension, to offers to help in registering a brand with Amazon, to seminars on how to become a dropshipper, and just on and on, frankly. The Amazon sellers' discussion list is full of stories of just how many of these proffered consulting services are scams in their own right. It's become quite hideous.

At any rate, I've long thought that the only hope for relief from this kind of market capture is public reporting on what goes on. The Verge article goes some way, as have the variety of articles over the past several years about working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but it's still not hitting the mainstream media.

And of course, the Amazon selling experience is as surreal as it is because Amazon has automated so much of it. It often feels that there will be some tipping point somewhere along the line, but I've had frequent arguments with people about how soon that will be.

24: good idea. I'm on my phone but I'll try.

Oh, no worries about stomping on Amazon talk. That shit (Amazon related) has been going on for so long.

25: "surreal" sounds right. Reading that article I found myself blaming the victims. I could only imagine that kind of thing happening to someone if they had been doing something like that to someone else. Maybe because the victims seemed to take it in stride a bit too quickly, but that's still completely irrational of me. I'm not sure if it's some vestige of medieval assumptions about morality, or because that's how things work in stories set in cyberpunk dystopias, which this strongly resembles.

28: Uh. I don't know why you'd blame the victims; the shit described happens to people when they've been minding their own business. I do blame people like the consultant woman Stine, who's obviously utterly captured by the Amazon mentality, started as a scanner monkey, now utterly capitulates to Amazon's world, and is thrilled to think that she might, in some form, actually work for or be sanctioned by god Amazon one day.

And I also blame the customers, Amazon buyers, who don't care to know what's behind the scenes. And I blame Bezos. The automation of the system he's set up is insane.

Though I will say that there are voices in, for example, the used book world, who do blame the victims for having laid* down with dogs (here, Amazon) in the first place. You know what happens to people who do that.

* should that be "lain"? Down with dogs? Past tense of "lie down with dogs"? Hmm.

29
Uh. I don't know why you'd blame the victims

Me neither. One of my guesses was essentially comparing it to a coping mechanism for dealing with a cruel and unfair world. Like I said, completely irrational.

The article made Stine sound like a lunatic. But who knows how fair the article is being to her?

Google, not Amazon, but I've just found out about this page which is the creepiest shit I've seen in a while. They've only made a list of my entire online purchase history!

@33 do you use a gmail account? Because they can populate that by just scraping your inbox.

Yeah, looking at mine, it's all from Gmail, oddly enough including the purchases from the Google Play store.

Yeah, they got it scraping my inbox.

I wonder what else they've scraped my inbox for?

I wonder what internal controls they have about who gets to scrape my inbox.

I wonder how well those controls are enforced.

Everything, controls that make sure they profit from it, poorly.

That shit needs to be regulated back to the Stone Age.

Security through obscurity!

I'll say that as a comparatively random Google employee I definitely don't have access to people's Gmail. There's some personal data (raw logs of user HTTP requests) for the service I work on (Flight Search) that I could access, but only in a "break glass" way that sets off alarms and requires me to answer to internal security teams about what I was doing and why I needed to do so within a day or two. Actual user data (docs, photos, gmail, chat, etc) is going to be even more protected than just access logs, and will similarly be limited to operational staff for a service and have some amount of break-glass access-controlled and logged access. One of the parts of Flight Search I work on is price tracking - you click a button to track the price for a flight, and we re-price it daily or so and show you a chart and send alerts when the price moves. That involves user data - knowing who tracked what - but my component just knows "at least one person asked to track UA234 on Jan. 8 2019", and the database that says what users tracked what flights isn't something I can look at, even in a break-glass way.

I have a vague idea what is needed to set up a new service that scrapes something from Gmail, including mandatory privacy reviews and sign-off from teams that are in a separate management chain. There's a whole infrastructure for running such scraping, where the output from the scraping resides in the same security perimeter as the gmail messages themselves, in effect, and stays associated with that account (and can similarly be wiped out with the account when the user chooses). We set up a "my trips" thing that's akin to that purchase list - just search for "my trips" and the search results will show any flight/hotel/etc. reservations that were seen in your Gmail account.

I guess my concern is that all those controls are internal to Google, and could potentially erode over time or disappear with a change of leadership. Regular, public auditing of these procedures seems like an appropriate policy response... not just for Google but for all the major tech companies (and a lot of the minor ones).

I'm also concerned with the possibility that state-based actors could find a way to access the system without tripping the various safeguards you have in place.

You guys are sitting on top of a major stockpile of what is effectively the weapons-grade plutonium of information warfare. Its a public hazard and I'd like to see a public role in keeping you accountable for its safety. That includes pushing you to take steps to reduce the size of the stockpile.

I do think Flight Search is pretty sweet, though.

What @41 said. The business model of Alphabet, Facebook and others (and to an extent Amazon), is predicated on building up an ever increasing store of data that becomes an increasingly attractive target over time.