AmazonFail

[kitchen_kink]

EDIT: Apparently I wasn't only behind on jumping on the bandwagon; I'm late in realizing that the bandwagon has been overturned and set on fire.

Sorry! Apparently the whole thing was a huge mistake and it's fixed. I'll still be shopping at Porter Square Books, though. :)


I'm late catching the bandwagon on this one, but the upshot is this: Amazon is removing the sales ranks from all books dealing with GLBT issues, claiming that they are "adult content," while leaving things like Playboy calendars and other heterosexually oriented adult material alone. This means that when you search for, say, a book on the history of the gay rights movement, the book you want won't appear on the first page of results, or maybe at all.

A good summary of the debacle is here.

I'm boycotting Amazon until further notice on this one, and I hope you'll consider doing the same. A petition against this madness is here.

Comments

[cos]

Actually, that's not it. An Amazon employee in France made a mistake that caused this to happen, and a few days later Amazon corrected it and sent out an apology. In the meantime a lot of people got outraged, though they'd never verified that Amazon did this on purpose, and Amazon was slow in explaining what happened (because they probably didn't know at first). Also, during this, a troll claimed to have hacked Amazon's system from the outside to cause this effect, and this was later debunked.

See the link about this that I posted to coslinks yesterday, also.

[ivy]

Well, not just that. The first replies from Amazon tech support did talk about their new policy being there to make all their customers comfortable. Given that, I think the outrage sounded a lot more reasonable, particularly in the face of no other word from Amazon. But agreed that it did turn out to be database fail, and that Amazon did later call it a ham-fisted and embarrassing error.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

You know this has been fixed, right? Granted, Amazon's apology was not so great, but at least they recognized that there was a problem and repaired it.

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

There was an external claim of responsibility from a hacker using unsecure "report this as adult content" buttons on the listings to get things delisted. He posted his scripts as well. Apparently it only took a few reports to get a book delisted without any kind of review.

I do not know if this person is legit or is just claiming it to increase his hacker standing. It does fit within the Amazon claim of a cataloging error that is now rectified.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

It's false. First, his code doesn't work. Second, even if it were massaged to work, that link never existed. Third, there's just no way Amazon is vulnerable to CSRF attacks.

[ivy]

Seconding novalis here. He's just claiming it, it's not true. His code didn't work, and depended on the existence of an input vector that didn't exist. Untrusted users cannot get a book delisted automatically by complaining, only the developers can do that.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Nope.

It was the mistake of a developer on amazon.fr taking 3 categories including human sexuality, health & beauty and a few others and merged them in with "adult". It got propagated to all Amazon properties and as a result the books got their sales rankings dropped and they were automatically pulled from the search engines.

It was the mistake of a single programmer. Sort of.

I'm doing up a post-analysis which involves an overview of how much Amazon lost monetarily that day as well as whether a few simple security controls in place when a cataloging change would result in that many books in dropping out of the search engine would cost less. ;)

Read the "Recent entries" to the right of the Seattle PI article to get what appears to be the most accurate reporting.

Risk management. I can haz SP 800-53?

[sparkymonster.livejournal.com]

I'd point out that it is not a coincidence that LGBT books disproportionately got tagged as being about "human sexuality" and thus disproportionately get tagged as adult.

Support your local bookstores. Harvard Bookstore, Porter Square books, etc. Also, www.powells.com

[cos]

Maybe. Or maybe he included some lgbt-related category among the sets he mistakenly merged.

[sparkymonster.livejournal.com]

LGBT issues tend to be seen as all about sex in ways similar issues aren't seen as being about sex if they dealt with straight people. "Heather has two Mommies" has been suppressed as being inappropriate for children because many people view the book as being about sex, even though books about loving heterosexual couples are not seen as being sex filled.

Simliarly, LGBT people are tolerated as long as they don't make a fuss, or push their orientation in people's faces. Which ends up with a LGBT person holding their same gendered partner's hand disgusting, while a straight couple doing the same thing is cute.

[cos]

All true, but none of which includes any actual facts about what happened at Amazon this time.

This also relates to the Clay Shirky blog post I linked on coslinks yesterday, I think.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Uh, you know this is all over and they've fixed it, right?

[poly-fi.livejournal.com]

Actually, I usually avoid Amazon for a different reason. A few years ago, I read on a website that Amazon and Borders were more prone to donating to Right causes than Dem type causes. I think Barnes and Noble is a little bit more Dem. So, if it's not Half Priced Books, an independent, or the library, I go with Barnes and Noble. I think the website is: www.buyblue.org . Unfortunately, it under construction, so I'm not positive.