Concerns over the size and scope of Amazon have been around for years, but only recently have some of their more dastardly deeds come to light.
This is an enormous corporation, after all, whose tentacles spread across American commerce in ways that only Rockefeller’s and Rothschild’s had previously imagined. We must be mindful of their every move because, if we’re not, they’ll scoop up every bit of business that they can.
Don’t believe that Amazon is nefarious by nature? Take a look at this:
Amazon employees have used data about the vast number of independent sellers on its platform to create competing products — in violation of its own policies and statements to Congress, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The retail giant, which has felt a surge of goodwill for providing essential goods nationwide amid the coronavirus pandemic and for planning to hire 175,000 new workers, has long claimed that it does not use proprietary data collected from the site’s third-party sellers in order to produce and sell its own products.
However, according to interviews with more than 20 former employees of the tech company’s private-label business and documents reviewed by the Journal, the company did do that. This type of information is very useful, as it can help Amazon figure out how to price something, what features of an item to copy or whether it’s worth entering a product segment based on consumer interest, sources explained to the Journal.
The Journal cites one example of Amazon employees gaining access to documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. That data included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Later on, Amazon’s private-label arm introduced its own car-trunk organizers.
Without enhanced government oversight, there is little doubt that Amazon will continue to harvest such data and consolidate market share.
