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Amazon Fires Employees Over Data Leak As It Fights Seller Scams, Report Says (thehill.com)
After investigating claims that its employees are taking bribes to sell internal data to merchants to help them increase their sales on the site, Amazon has reportedly fired several employees involved in the scams. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon let go of several workers in the U.S. and India who allegedly inappropriately accessed company data that disreputable merchants had misused. The Hill reports: Amazon is focusing its internal bribery investigation on India, a person familiar with the effort told the paper. Some employees in India and China working as customer support have said that their access to an internal database that allows them to find data about specific product performance or trending keywords has been dramatically limited. Amazon has also deleted thousand of suspect reviews, restricted sellers' access to customer data on its platform, and quashed some methods to force the site to bring up certain products higher in search results, the people told the Journal. "We have strict policies and a Code of Business Conduct & Ethics in place for our employees. We implement sophisticated systems to restrict and audit access to information," the company wrote. "We hold our employees to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our Code faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties."
"In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action," Amazon added.
"In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action," Amazon added.
Studies have shown that corruption is a major impediment to economic growth. Both of these countries have experienced huge economic growth in the past 50 years, but they've realized that corruption is holding them back.
China is fighting corruption in their civil service. India tried demonetizing their two largest currency notes to fight "dark money".
What I'm saying is, it's not just Amazon trying to "inject" these western values. If your Indian counterpart wants to improve his living conditions he's going to have to do it honestly, or watch as one rich multinational after another pulls out of his country or implements police-state level controls to keep their employees in line.
Corruption hurts these countries in other ways too, it diverts money from legitimate businesses and discourages entrepreneurship.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Exactly. The problem is those guys were caught selling the data Amazon uses to cut these online retailers who operate on their site off in the first place.
And so they get fired which is as it should be.
Which is not enough. When people systematically take bribes (part of their culture, or the data they handle for low wages is worth lots), then you loose much more than the guy who got fired after three months. Especially if the next guy takes bribes in the same fashion.
There are limits to how cheap wages can be, compared to the value of what they handle. You cannot really underpay a goldsmith - he will arrange his own pay then. If the response is a security guard, then you're suddenly paying for a guard too. And if the value of stealables is high enough for both of them . . .