Amazon Investigation

Amazon is investigating allegations that some employees may have sold customer data to third-party companies that Amazon did business with particularly in China. IT security experts commented below.

Niles Rowland, Director of Product Development at The Media Trust:

“Most threats are internal and they can cause the most significant damage. These threats include those related to third parties with whom organizations have become increasingly dependent. And, when you transplant operations to geographies where legal infrastructures are weaker, these threats can escalate. The growing number of consumer data protection laws like GDPR that are sweeping across the world will require companies to be more vigilant about how they and their third parties collect, process, share, and store personally identifiable information. These laws should be a top management and board issue because they can have an impact on how businesses perform and are evaluated. Lack of preparation for these laws can result not only in penalties tied to infringement of such laws, but also shareholder lawsuits if the lack of preparedness impacts shareholder value.”

Matt West, CRO at Feefo: 

“Deleting negative reviews is counter-intuitive. Not only does it falsely distort the image of the product or services a company like Amazon is selling, but it also causes doubt in the consumers mind that the reviews are even real in the first place, a wholly positive picture is too good to be true,” said Matt West, CRO at Feefo.

“It’s rare to buy something online without seeing some negative sentiment, and in most cases it’s not even about the product but poor delivery, for example. Businesses need to realise that consumers value trust and transparency above all else, our research indicates that 89% of UK consumers agree with this.

“This demonstrates the need for retailers to become more transparent. Retailers must ensure their customers are basing decisions from real opinions of other customers rather than cherry-picked, positive reviews that suit the retailer, in order for customers to trust them. A direct result will be customers sticking with that brand for the long-term.”