{"id":9426,"date":"2022-01-10T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9426"},"modified":"2022-02-16T08:12:03","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T13:12:03","slug":"amazon-all-about-customer-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9426","title":{"rendered":"Amazon: All About Customer Experience?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Millions of people have benefited from Amazon\u2019s single-minded quest to create frictionless commerce. Pretty much everything it might occur to us to want\u2014from a book to laundry detergent to a snow blower\u2014arrives, if not overnight, well before we\u2019ve forgotten ordering it. Customer reviews, price comparisons, and Q&As guide our choices and let us weigh in with praise or complaints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind that wall of customer-facing information is a lot of other information. About us. Information we have trusted the company with. Yet it seems Amazon has done a remarkably poor job minding that particular store. In the current issue of Wired<\/em>, Will Evans writes about \u201cAmazon\u2019s Dark Secret\u201d\u2014one that\u2019s been obscured by Amazon\u2019s disingenuous assertions that privacy is \u201csewn into\u201d everything the company does. (Read the full eye-popping article from Reveal and Wired<\/em> here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too many of the company\u2019s 575,000 employees worldwide have access to customer data. This has allowed low-level employees to snoop on purchases made by celebs<\/a>, to use customer data to help third-party sellers sabotage their competitors<\/a>, to mess with Amazon\u2019s product review system<\/a>, and to enable sale of low-quality knock-off products<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our data were so readily available that, for years, Amazon didn\u2019t even know where the relevant databases\u2014including credit card numbers\u2014were. Funny, hackers could find them<\/a>. If a design team wanted a database, it was readily available to them. If they made a copy, no one in the company security apparatus knew. In short, \u201cAmazon had thieves in its house and sensitive data streaming out beyond its walls.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Management for years turned a blind eye to these problems. Raising a red flag was a good way for an employee, including members of the too-small security staff, to get shut down or shut out. The whole edifice became shakier when the EU established its General Data Protection Regulation, and Amazon, like every other company dealing with EU members\u2019 citizens, had to comply by the May 2018 deadline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amazon spokespeople deny the general tenor of the article and emphasize progress that\u2019s been made, but you might want to read the whole electrifying saga. Bits and pieces of this story have been coming out for several years, but like Gerald Posner\u2019s excellent God\u2019s Bankers<\/a><\/em>, pulling all these stories together in a coherent narrative, as here, makes for a compelling indictment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Millions of people have benefited from Amazon\u2019s single-minded quest to create frictionless commerce. Pretty much everything it might occur to us to want\u2014from a book to laundry detergent to a snow blower\u2014arrives, if not overnight, well before we\u2019ve forgotten ordering … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"For years, Amazon's focus on \"customer experience\" has trumped corporate concerns about privacy. Peek behind the curtain.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[35,186,104],"tags":[571],"class_list":["post-9426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life","category-technology","category-the-morgue","tag-privacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2s2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9428,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9426\/revisions\/9428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}