But of course it does this. What is amazing to me is that any of these merchants were naive enough to believe Amazon when they assured them (and Congress) that it would never do and had never done this.

Why do people participate in platforms which are obviously in a position to leverage their privileged intimate knowledge about them against them? Why do people join Facebook or have Google accounts or Android phones or Ring doorbells or Amazon Alexas when they know full well those companies can and will leverage those technologies against them at a time and manner of their choosing?

The only thing I can imagine is that all those people don't think they matter. They don't question what's handed to them. They can't or won't entertain the notion that what they may want for themselves could conflict with what Google wants, and Google wil reach out and destroy them if they try to go against it. That just never ever enters their thinking at all.

I can almost understand this for a broad swath of the population but in the narrow vertical of merchants and their sales information, it dumfounds me. I would never set up shop on Amazon for exactly this reason. Neither would I trust Amazon's cloud services to honestly track CPU cycles I have to pay them for. It's a non-starter; it's a joke.

Why do people do these things?