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Amazon has a transparency problem.

Three years ago, the retail giant became the last major tech company to reveal how many subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders it received for customer data in a half-year period. While every other tech giant had regularly published its government request figures for years, spurred on by accusations of participation in government surveillance, Amazon had been largely forgotten.

Eventually, people noticed and Amazon acquiesced.

Since then, Amazon's business has expanded. By its quarterly revenue, it's no longer a retail company -- it's a cloud giant and a device maker. The company's flagship Echo, an "always listening" speaker, collects vast amounts of customer data that's openly up for grabs by the government.

But Amazon's bi-annual transparency figures don't want you to know that.

In fact, Amazon has been downright deceptive in how it presents the data, obfuscating the figures in its short, but contextless, twice-yearly reports. Not only does Amazon offer the barest minimum of information possible, the company has -- and continues -- to deliberately mislead its customers by actively refusing to clarify how many customers, and which customers, are affected by the data demands it receives.

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https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/bo...on-deliveries/

While you might think it would be great to receive a never-ending stream of free tech stuff from Amazon, a couple from near Boston who are receiving just that eventually got weirded out by the whole thing and just want it to stop.

Michael and Kelly Gallivan never ordered any of it, and after five months of deliveries — all from China and which have so far included everything from bluetooth speakers and humidifiers to phone chargers and flashlights — they’ve had enough. But ending it is proving a challenge.

With a couple of items turning up every week, the Gallivans became worried they might end up having to pay for it all. There were no sender addresses or invoice slips with the packages, making them difficult to trace and impossible to return. Amazon asked Mike for order numbers but of course he didn’t have any. All the company could say with any certainty was that all of the items were ordered using gift cards.

“[Amazon] told us to send them back to the distribution facility in Lexington, Kentucky, but by that time we’d received a lot more of these things and it became kind of like, ‘This is ridiculous, trying to carry that plan out,’” Mike told the BBC on Sunday, February 11.

Desperate to find a solution, Mike googled “unordered packages from Amazon” and several articles showed up describing a practice known as “brushing.”

The scam, which has actually been going on for a number of years, enables an online seller to submit positive reviews for their own products via fake accounts. Hiding behind one of the fake accounts, the online seller — or more likely a brushing firm hired by the seller — goes through the usual process of searching for an item on Amazon (or another ecommerce site) before making a purchase. This “normal” activity makes it harder for Amazon to identify the account as fake, and so the company fails to spot the bogus reviews. In many cases, the review will be for an item of higher value than the one sent out. Amazon is constantly battling to rid its site of fake reviews, but the rogue sellers clearly aren’t giving up.

Mike says he can’t be certain, but he guesses that his details were taken when he ordered an item online from China last spring.

Why send stuff to the U.S.?
But why are the China-based sellers sending stuff overseas? According to Forbes, this has to do with subsidized postage rates offered by the U.S. Postal Service that make it cheaper for Chinese sellers to send overseas rather than domestically.

Amazon told CBS News that it looks into every report of customers receiving unsolicited packages and will endeavor to ban all vendors and reviewers who abuse the system.

But the Gallivans’ experience now has some people wondering just how many others are receiving free stuff via Amazon that they didn’t even order, but are perhaps enjoying the unexpected “gifts” and so choose to keep quiet about it.

Mike said he hasn’t received any new deliveries in the last few days, and hopes it has something to do with the worldwide attention the story’s been getting. But who knows, in the morning there may just be another USB hand warmer or set of tent lights waiting on his doorstep.

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