For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels.
To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example).
The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet).
Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves.
This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).
All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".
It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.
You do all this. Then someone asks you whether you can promise that Amazon employees don't access the data. You are unable to promise it. The newspaper headline reads: "Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data".
Yes it's a pretty bullshit article title. I am concerned over the access to aggregated sales data though by people who will be involved in product development. It's similar to insider trading, and requires real enforcement of "policy" with 3rd party review IMO.
For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels.
To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example).
The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet).
Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves.
This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).