Amazon, the Bully of the Boardwalk when it comes to eCommerce, sells things on its powerful website for third parties. They also sell their own private label products.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of  data captured thereby. Take a second and imagine what data such an assignment might generate — popularity of product, names of buyers, pricing info?

So, there has been a persistent “rumor” that Amazon has been using this third party data to decide what items to make for its own account. Act surprised to learn that Amazon makes its own private label offerings — 158,000 such products at last count. Wow!

Immediately, your ethical alarms begin to signal. The red light goes on, it twirls, the siren sounds.

When asked by the US Congress, Amazon gave this answer:

“Well, no, of course, we don’t use third party data to determine what things we might private label, make for our account, but, but, but we might use something we call ‘aggregated data.'”

Continue reading →