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OT: I agree Google has become monster-ish. But when this talk comes up, I can't help but think Amazon is just as if not more of a monster. Especially the emplo

OT: I agree Google has become monster-ish. But when this talk comes up, I can't help but think Amazon is just as if not more of a monster. Especially the employee horror stories and now slashing Whole Food prices. While its awesome for it's customers, I'm worried about long term effects. /r

cisanti 9y ago
But Google has much more global power. Amazon is in Europe and other places too, but nowhere strong as in the United States. Google, on the other hand, has most of the world under its arm, besides China and maybe Russia.
gaius 9y ago
I can easily choose to avoid Amazon - they aren't seeding the entire internet with sly tracking technologies. They are a logistics business that makes money by moving stuff from warehouses to customers. Similarly Apple wants to sell you an iPhone and a laptop and Microsoft wants to sell you an office suite and a database. Real companies with real products and services. But Google's ONLY business is stealing and selling personal data.
- kromem 9y ago
  Really? Go ahead and avoid anything hosted on or using AWS. Might be a bit difficult, and you may reconsider Amazon's scale relative to Google.
  - gaius 9y ago
    A fair point but I've not seen even a hint that Amazon themselves are tracking me across AWS hosted services. Do you have any evidence or links?
    - sbov 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure companies would not be happy if they found out Amazon was tracking those companies' customers. If it got out, it would probably be huge. Not worth it for Amazon to do this.
      - londons_explore 9y ago
        The only practical way to do such tracking reliably would be to inject html into every page loaded from one of their CDN's. That would be visible to everyone, and they don't do this. Hence, either they have fairly ineffective IP address based tracking, or no tracking at all.
    - ludjer 9y ago
      They wont need to add cookies or anything like that. They can track you just by parsing the connection logs on their routers and switches. Also every thing that is billable is logged. So technically they are already tracking and recording every access across their network. It is impossible to verify if they actually do this without anyone leaking information that worked on the system.

cisanti 9y ago

But Google has much more global power. Amazon is in Europe and other places too, but nowhere strong as in the United States. Google, on the other hand, has most of the world under its arm, besides China and maybe Russia.

gaius 9y ago

I can easily choose to avoid Amazon - they aren't seeding the entire internet with sly tracking technologies. They are a logistics business that makes money by moving stuff from warehouses to customers. Similarly Apple wants to sell you an iPhone and a laptop and Microsoft wants to sell you an office suite and a database. Real companies with real products and services. But Google's ONLY business is stealing and selling personal data.

kromem 9y ago
Really? Go ahead and avoid anything hosted on or using AWS. Might be a bit difficult, and you may reconsider Amazon's scale relative to Google.
- gaius 9y ago
  A fair point but I've not seen even a hint that Amazon themselves are tracking me across AWS hosted services. Do you have any evidence or links?
  - sbov 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure companies would not be happy if they found out Amazon was tracking those companies' customers. If it got out, it would probably be huge. Not worth it for Amazon to do this.
    - londons_explore 9y ago
      The only practical way to do such tracking reliably would be to inject html into every page loaded from one of their CDN's. That would be visible to everyone, and they don't do this. Hence, either they have fairly ineffective IP address based tracking, or no tracking at all.
  - ludjer 9y ago
    They wont need to add cookies or anything like that. They can track you just by parsing the connection logs on their routers and switches. Also every thing that is billable is logged. So technically they are already tracking and recording every access across their network. It is impossible to verify if they actually do this without anyone leaking information that worked on the system.