The company's rewiring of retail puts customers at risk.
 | By Rachel Poser Sunday Review Editor, Opinion |
According to my Amazon order history, which I can regrettably access in its entirety, over the past year I bought a shower curtain, four ceramic mugs, a lemon zester, a bike pump, a jasmine plant and a T-shirt that says I <3 Skater Boys. (No explanation will be offered at this time.) None of those things were made by Amazon; they all came from third-party sellers whose names I didn't recognize — or even look at, until preparing to write this newsletter. When choosing my zester I relied on the thousands of five-star reviews other customers had left on the product page. "This little guy packs a big punch in the kitchen," Earthbaby87 had written. "It's perfect." I trusted that Earthbaby87 was looking out for me — though maybe I shouldn't have. |
In a guest essay this week, Moira Weigel, a professor at Northeastern who studies tech platforms, writes that "several recent developments call into question whether Amazon's marketplace deserves the trust we place in it." Last year, a data breach of a Chinese server revealed that as many as 75,000 seller accounts on Amazon had been purchasing reviews from customers. The year before, six people were indicted by a grand jury in Washington for bribing Amazon employees to reinstate seller accounts that had been suspended, among other unethical practices. The first of them to stand trial was handed a 10-month prison sentence in February. |
When people get hurt by products sold on Amazon — when a laptop battery explodes or a toy hoverboard catches fire — the company has adopted a strategy common among tech platforms, arguing that it is not liable for damages because it's only a conduit. "There has been much discussion in recent years of the fact that existing laws exempt Google and Facebook and Twitter from liability for user-generated content, even when that content is false or promotes harassment," Weigel writes. "Amazon has used the same law to argue that it is not responsible for false claims by third parties who sell things on its site." |
Should The Everything Store be responsible for everything it sells? |
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