Is Amazon planning a new wave of store closures? Be careful if you receive this email!

Recently, some sellers’ stores have suddenly been blocked, and the notification emails they received turned out to be a rare closure due to “leaking user information”!

It is generally difficult to determine if user information has been leaked, and if the situation is not serious, the store will not be closed. Therefore, in the past, there were very few cases of store closures caused by "information leakage". Recently, when many sellers received this information, they did not even know that there was such a reason for the store closure.

In fact, think about it, even if we use the customer delivery information in the self-delivered order, we must have "sent it to the freight forwarder", "copied it and made a table to count customer data", etc. In these cases, Amazon cannot find out what you used the customer information for. In a very limited case, a customer returns a product, and a new customer happens to place an order for the same product. When you send the return address to the previous customer, you directly write the new customer's information, which is equivalent to delivering the returned product directly to the next customer. Because you have to contact through Amazon's internal message, Amazon can only catch you abusing the customer's delivery information at this time.

This is also one of the few cases where a store can be closed for this reason. After all, Amazon will only close your store if it has solid evidence that you have leaked information. It is impossible to be caught for things like copying information and compiling statistics into tables, which we often do.

So why has the frequency of occurrence increased recently? There is a piece of news that can be linked to this situation.

Just last week, several US senators jointly sent a formal letter to Amazon, questioning the security of Amazon's user data and requiring Amazon to disclose to relevant departments its work on data collection and security practices, as well as information on the sale of these technologies to third parties before August 26.

The official document states that Amazon has been collecting and managing user data for a long time, but the public is not satisfied with the results. It is also well known that Amazon tracks and abuses data to improve advertising , which is an infringement of user privacy information and has caused many citizens to worry. Amazon needs to prove that it has the ability to manage this content and stay within the boundaries, and has sufficient respect and measures for citizens' privacy information.

Amazon currently refuses to respond to the senators’ joint letter, which is actually very disadvantageous to Amazon, because Amazon has been fined $888.6 million by the European executive agency for information security issues! It has set a record for the highest commercial fine in the history of the European Union! At this moment, the silence on the joint letter of the US senators is likely to attract sanctions from relevant US agencies!

Of course, we can't say that Amazon is just going to sit there and wait for death. Although it appears to have made no response, it has actually been carrying out preliminary rectification in the background, plugging the information leakage policies that may be discovered by regulatory agencies, and making advance review and filing. This is why many sellers have had their stores closed due to information leaks in the past two days, because Amazon is strictly investigating the information leakage issue and preparing for the government review that may come soon.

Therefore, these two days are definitely a sensitive period for buyer information leakage. Fortunately, the operation is not too serious. As long as the buyer information is used in Amazon's in-site messages, backend, etc., there will be no problem.