Amazon was caught selling thousands of items declared dangerous by federal agencies



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Amazon's digital marketplace sells everything from diapers to tiny homes, to the delight of millions of customers around the world.

As part of its efforts to offer such a wide variety of items, Amazon's storefront is open to third-party sellers. The latter sometimes offer items that would not withstand the regulation of federal regulators.

In fact, in a recent Wall Street Journal survey, some 4,100 items were found on sale in the Amazon showcase "that were declared dangerous by federal agencies."

Worse: among these 4,100 odd items, "at least 2,000 listings for toys and medications" lacked standard labelse At least one of the children's products tested has exceeded acceptable standards for lead, which can lead to major health problems in children.

As a result of the investigation conducted by the Journal, Amazon has edited or deleted thousands of listings.

The survey highlights a fundamental problem with a wide range of technology platforms that have become increasingly important in recent years, ranging from Amazon to Twitter to Google and YouTube: Providing a broad platform Open form involves monitoring a large open platform. can be extremely difficult.

In the case of Amazon, sellers around the world can become third party partners and sell products. It is extremely difficult to regulate such a market and some aberrations are inevitable.

This seems to be the case here, but with the huge scale of Amazon's digital storefront, "some aberrations" means the sale of thousands of products that do not comply with federal regulations.

An Amazon representative told the Journal that he was using an automation to control his showcase. These tools have prevented the sale of three billion "suspect" items only in 2018, said the representative. "In case of a problem, we quickly protect our customers and work directly with sellers, brands and government agencies."

In addition, Amazon has published a response to the report on its own blog. The answer describes how Amazon manages store regulations:

"Once a product is available in our store, we continually analyze our product lists and updates to find products that may be a problem, and our tools analyze hundreds of millions of products in minutes. Analyze the more than five billion daily changes made to product detail pages and analyze the tens of millions of customer comments sent each week to look for worrying signs and investigate accordingly Our tools use natural language processing and machine learning, which means that new information is introduced daily into our tools to enable them to learn, and constantly improves the proactive blocking of suspicious products. "

Check out the Wall Street Journal's full article to learn more about the risks presented by Amazon's third-party sellers.

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