Amazon.com: FAIL and you

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches the AmazonFail, and asks how this could have happened and what could be done to prevent it. Not to mention Facebook pages we'd like to see...

Robert McMillan reminds us what happened:

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. blamed a glitch that knocked gay-and-lesbian-themed books out of its main product search engine on a "ham-fisted cataloging error" ... The problem was first reported on Sunday by author Mark Probst, who ... noticed that the search rankings on the Amazon site had been dropped for his own novel, The Filly, and other gay-themed books.

His report set off a firestorm in the blogosphere, where some accused the company of antigay censorship ... Amazon said that the exclusions were actually caused by a glitch and that ... It affected 57,310 books worldwide "in a number of broad categories."

Andrea James gathers an inside look at what happened:

I've spoken to an Amazon.com employee ... at least 20 Amazon.com employees were paged alerting them ... Amazon.com had upgraded the problem to Sev-1.
...
An employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult" ... "It's no big policy change, just some field that's been around forever filled out incorrectly," the source said. Amazon employees worked on the problem well past midnight, and then handed it over to an international team.

Bob Warfield says, "Data Matters Too":

No software company in their right mind would change code and move it to production without extensive testing to make sure the new code wasn’t broken ... The AmazonFail incident shows us that there is a lot more than just program code at stake here ... As I write this, “#amazonfail” is the third most popular search term on all of Twitter.
...
Doesn’t this sound just like the sort of problem that can be caused by making a minor code change and then rolling out the changed code to production without adequate testing? ... In this day and age of Cloud Computing, SaaS, and web applications, data is becoming increasingly just as critical as code.  Metadata, for example, is the stuff of which customizations to multi-tenant architectures are made of. In that sense, it is code of a sort.

But Mary Hodder smells a large rodent:

Note that Amazon's ... explanation that this was all “a glitch” ... contradicts earlier email from them to authors stating that they were in the “adult” category simply for including positive gay and lesbian themes in their works and that’s why they lost their “Sales Rank” statistic that would keep them in search results. It was a very targeted glitch for sure. Targeted to, among other things, “positive references to sexual orientation == gay” placing them into the “adult” category, which allowed the other minor “glitch” by the programmer to be possible.

If all this seems like a problem, and it should, it’s because Amazon is using algorithms, which rely on their classification system, with various statistics like “Sales Rank” to rank products in search results on the site. These algorithms and classifications have points of view ... The bar for ethics in creating algorithms and classification systems should be very high. #AmazonFail proved it’s not, at least at Amazon.

At which, Tom "PseudononymousX" Chamberlain throws rocks:

Ms. Hodder is saying "the bar should be set high" but what she really means is "the bar should be set where I want it."  I don't particularly agree with them but I know several fundamentalist Christians who would consider Amazon's "glitch" to be setting the bar high.
...
There are two camps in a culture war here and Amazon's just trying to stay neutral ... The truth is a lot of their customers consider all material regarding Gays and Lesbians to be "adult" material. Now obviously Ms. Hodder thinks that's wrong and would like Amazon to ignore those people. But she should at least be honest with herself and realize doing that isn't removing bias from the algorithm it's just putting her bias in place of the bias that's there.
...
If you want companies to be more transparent you have to accept the reasonable compromises they have to make to stay in business. It's unreasonable to expect Amazon to take a side in the culture wars.

Meanwhile, Jane is more constructive:

In order for Amazon to right this situation it must do the following:

1. Tell us what the adult content policy is.
2. Explain how one is notified of their book being filtered by the adult policy so the author can challenge it.
3. Apologize for targeting gay/lesbian/sex/erotica/erotic books unfairly and promise that it will not do so again.

And finally...

• Facebook Pages We'd Like to See

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Windows 7? Not this year.
• Twitter reels from Mikeyy's XSS 'sploits
• Conficker botnet wakes up and smells the coffee
• ...more

Buffer overflow:

• Shark Bait: Laptop stolen and then... returned!
• Pamela Jones: More SCO Bankruptcy Filings
• Sam Dean: Training: The Missing Link in Business Adoption of Open Source?
• Security For All: Strange week for Microsoft
• Neelakanth Nadgir: MySQL Scalability on Nehalem systems (Sun Fire X4270)
• Andrew LaVallee: After StumbleUpon, Which Internet Company Spins Off Next?
• Paul Stamatiou: Thoughts on Netbooks
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.