The first shot of the new year! Amazon's new feature to crack down on multiple accounts is launched!

Today is the first working day after the Chinese New Year, but most couriers and factories are still shut down. Sellers who don’t have to worry about shipping usually use this time to sort out their New Year plans, develop some potential new products, and even sellers who have expanded their business will think about opening new sites and new stores.

Although Amazon has always strictly prohibited multiple account operations, it has sophisticated means to check the stores using the same browser or network, and the consequences of being linked are very serious, and sellers who have experienced opening stores are well aware of it. However, the devil is always stronger than the saint, and sellers always have ways to circumvent these inspections, especially Chinese sellers, who are even more proficient in multiple account operations.

Now, Amazon is going to be one step ahead with this new feature, which will definitely make domestic sellers in a hurry.

According to well-known foreign media, Amazon is testing a facial recognition system for sellers, which aims to collect sellers' real facial information for use in certain review processes to prevent multiple account operations.

In this news, a Vietnamese seller said that when he registered a store account, Amazon popped up a page asking him to collect a 5-second facial video as part of his account information.

Below is the page that requires sellers to provide facial videos. Sellers need to click the middle button to authorize the use of the camera to start recording, and judging from the suffix of the URL, it is a Canadian site .

The whistleblower and the media have expressed their distrust of Amazon's move. As personal biometric information that cannot be changed, fingerprints, facial structure, irises and other information are much more important than passwords. When processing this information of users, it often involves a wide range of issues.

How will Amazon handle this information? Can sellers delete or modify this information? Which sellers need to provide facial information? Most importantly, will Amazon use this facial information for other purposes? ? Amazon did not answer any of these questions. Currently, only one official spokesperson said that "Amazon has been committed to improving the seller experience."

But from the current situation, the purpose of this function is obviously to target sellers' multi-account operations.

In the news, Amazon officials revealed that a Chinese seller was operating multiple accounts and even asked international students to use their bank accounts to register stores.

This kind of multi-account operation is common among our sellers. Everyone knows the crackdown policy but has to do it. If this policy is implemented on a large scale and requires existing accounts to upload videos, some small and medium-sized companies will be in a very embarrassing situation. Different stores certainly cannot use the same facial information, but it is also unrealistic for each store to enter the facial information of the operation separately. The flow of personnel can easily cause big troubles for the company.

Amazon's facial recognition system, Amazon Rekognition, has also had its share of blunders. In a test by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year, Rekognition mistakenly identified 28 members of Congress as criminals.

The ACLU used Rekognition to compare photos of 535 members of Congress with 25,000 criminal photos released by the police, and screened out 28 matching results. Although Amazon came out to clarify, the effect was minimal. Afterwards, several members of Congress even wrote to my brother-in-law to request a meeting.

Does the high recognition error rate mean that even if I change someone else to review it, the probability of passing it is high? Yes, but we need to look at both sides of the problem. A high recognition error rate also means that the facial information you uploaded may be matched with someone else's and cause an association.

What’s even worse is that in the ACLU’s test, Rekognition had a higher error rate for people of color . Of the 28 people it mismatched, 40% were people of color, while among the 535 members of Congress, only 20% were people of color.

The launch of this system is really targeting Chinese sellers. Amazon has not yet responded whether it will be implemented on a large scale. However, Amazon's existing screening of multiple accounts has been bypassed by most sellers, and a new review mechanism is urgently needed to further prevent sellers from illegally operating multiple accounts. Whether it will be facial recognition, we still have to pay attention to the official's next move.