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"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, A

"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the same?

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bobbychairs 6y ago
Not trying to come across as judgemental. But if I may ask, did you at the time feel like that was an ethical thing to do?
- throwaway_aws 6y ago
  I joined after the team had gotten traction already. Both the GM and senior most product person on the team told me about their tactics independently. To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new things. On a day to day basis the only pressure was to build... I don't remember instances where ethical guidelines were brought up. So, in a way, the outcomes were a result of what people were rewarded on. Only after I left AWS I started thinking it was ethically iffy. I still believe Amazon is an amazing company and my time at AWS was one of the best learning experiences.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I wish we went into this in much more detail in high school when covering economics and ethics (if the school even bothers to teach ethics). It should be a prerequisite in any capitalistic economy (but not only those, it can easily be extended to other things). I've also worked in industries that I think don't operate very ethically. It's amazing what you can ignore as an outlier because the alternative is uncomfortable or means you have to make a large personal change.
    - tekknik 6y ago
      A large personal change like going hungry? Not feeding your family?
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Well, yeah. Or just having to look for a new job that may or may not pay as much. But I wasn't really going that far as saying people (myself, at one point, if you notice what I wrote) staying at a company they feel is acting unethically, but actually just noticing and accepting the company as doing unethical things instead of attributing it to an outlying situation that isn't indicative of how things are normally done. Companies and people sometimes do shitty things. It isn't always on purpose (misunderstandings, one bad person, etc), and there isn't always a good way to fix it afterwards. I don't condemn people and companies because of this, and there's a tendency to assume this when you see something and work at the company. It can take a while before you start seeing a pattern and accept that it might just be how things are done sometimes and the management is fine with it. If you don't have a lot of options, I think there's a tendency for people to not look closer either on purpose or subconsciously because they might not like what they find, and then they've put themselves in a harder situation, where they must choose between what they believe is right and a hardship. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and the human mind is very complex. That's all I'm saying.
bald 6y ago
> confidential information aka, we did not sign an NDA with the party across the table
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  This doesn't matter if you don't have the millions set aside to defend yourself in court against a giant conglomerate. Giant companies breaking NDAs with scrappy startups is a story I have heard often.
  - jariel 6y ago
    This generally is not the case. If you blatantly ignore and NDA, and then make a lot of money from it, then the 'small startup' will have a ton of money because the prize is huge, i.e. a % cut to lawyers who can work pro-bono. Imagine you have a $10B company and some bonehead PM steals info from some small startup, for some stupid small project - it puts everything at risk. In most case, I think you have boneheaded actors, usually not acting in the best interest of the company.
former-aws 6y ago
Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.
- rckoepke 6y ago
  What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    Given how granular AWS billing data is, I would expect the odds to be fairly good that it alone is sufficient to make a good analysis for which third-party offerings are compelling markets. Then AWS takes their execution advantage, along with things like the lower friction that arises from first-party integration with IAM and billing, as well as not having to pay retail for the cloud resources, and it becomes very difficult to retain a moat unless you have a paradigm or perspective that is both critical to succeeding and is also incompatible with AWS culture.
    - QuinnyPig 6y ago
      You’re correct. It’s disturbingly detailed as far as what it reveals about architecture.
  - whoisjuan 6y ago
    I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.
arprocter 6y ago
Interesting Previous discussion of Amazon releasing a Basics version of an item at half the price: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973
ggl_thorwaway 6y ago
When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us. Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.
- deleted 6y ago
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- former-googler 6y ago
  Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art. Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees". If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal. Disclaimer: former googler.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".
    - abfan1127 6y ago
      I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.
      - jbay808 6y ago
        Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent. There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen one solution. That doesn't seem like a strong enough reason for a blanket policy. IANAL but this confuses me.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Just ... wow. This is an egregious abuse of monopoly power and is exactly the kind of thing that antitrust laws are supposed to address. I was certainly naive when I heard about other big retailers who would refuse to allow any subcontractors to use AWS. "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.
- deleted 6y ago
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- TimSchumann 6y ago
  > "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess. It’s remarkable to me how many competent programmers with years or decades experience in this industry don’t understand —- If you’re using AWS, Amazon has access to ALL of the data you put on AWS. Not that they 'can' or 'want to', given the current state of technology they absolutely have to have access to all your data for AWS to function. There isn’t currently a feasible technical way to work around this. And to head off all the ‘but FHE’ comments, see the ‘currently feasible’ above.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    I'm not talking about not having any access in the technical sense. I'm talking about a "Chinese wall" whereby people who work for AWS supporting customers should absolutely not be able to inform any of the teams that build new Amazon services. These types of Chinese walls exist in many different industries, perhaps most famously finance, and when these walls have been "breached" in the past it has resulted in huge scandals.
    - Aperocky 6y ago
      I think your understanding is true, unless the claimant elaborate what those data is and how his team got it, I do not understand how it would have worked. Access records for public services have a very detailed iam audit trail that logs people who accessed what at what time, and service teams don't get to just jump around that. Maybe they can see some metadata but certainly not actual data in an S3 bucket somewhere.
jacquesm 6y ago
Wow. I understand you do this as a throwaway but if true this is very bad stuff and it would be nice to have a lot more substantiation so that it could be verified.
- ceedan 6y ago
  If you're building a competing product and using a monopoly in order to price gouge - nothing is throwaway.
  - greenshackle2 6y ago
    The HN account is a throwaway, that's what they're talking about.
- throwaway_aws 6y ago
  I wish I could reveal team and product name... but that would be a career suicide. I'm not asking you to believe what I'm saying... but I truly am sharing my experience. I'd encourage you to talk to folks you know from AWS who were there for last 8-10 years.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Are you still with Amazon?
  - deleted 6y ago
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NicoJuicy 6y ago
And that's why existing businesses joining the cloud pick azure.
- atarian 6y ago
  What makes you think Microsoft would behave differently?
  - xnyan 6y ago
    They are not as competent at sherlocking as Amazon.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      What a wonderful verb; thanks for relieving my ignorance. ISTM Amazon misses out on some aspects of the idiomatic definition, since they failed to popularize their own brand of client machines with an OS they control. I think the original Netscape folks would disagree with your assessment of M$ sherlocking competence.
  - mhoad 6y ago
    I presume it would be a lack of history doing the exact thing amazon are accused of doing here? That and the fact that they aren’t doing an e-commerce business in the way Amazon is.
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    Since Microsoft has always known to threat their business partners fair.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
bdefore 6y ago
Would Amazon be more, less, or equally liable if you used a cloud provider that then relied upon AWS for its hosting. How would a startup that was concerned of Amazon copying it be certain to avoid such surveillance other than running its own data center?
gaogao 6y ago
There's a House of Reps. hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power next Monday with Bezos attending. If anyone has some staffer friends, could be a good line of questioning to poke them about.
- thetinguy 6y ago
  Please do this. The only way people like Bezos are held accountable are from people speaking up.
cheez 6y ago
Funny... I have software that combines well with something that has an online app store. They've been begging me to put my stuff in there. Nothing doing, I seen how you guys have embraced and extinguished others. They just took out their biggest app on the app store with their own version.
divbzero 6y ago
This echoes the distrust felt by many Amazon Marketplace sellers that drives them to seek alternatives like Shopify.
- ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
  Shopify is way way worse than Amazon. If you think Amazon is evil, Shopify is 10 steps ahead. It's not just my experience. Talking to startups and warehouses in Canada, the stories are all about how Shopify invites for friendly talks and then stonewalls you once they have got the required information
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
As it happens, the Congresswoman who represents the part of Seattle that contains Amazon is on the House Judiciary committee, and may also very well be your member of Congress. Seems like something her office would probably want to know about if you could substantiate the claim. https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congressional-delegation-contacts/representative-pramila-jayapal/ https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres... (ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS and District Director's email addresses.)
- rattray 6y ago
  It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying. It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.
  - Kudos 6y ago
    I'm not super familiar with antitrust laws, but it feels like they might apply here.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      Is AWS a monopoly?
      - pixelbash 6y ago
        Isn't the important factor whether it's trying to become one? Windows and IE were never the only possible options.
        heavyset_go 6y ago
        A de facto monopoly doesn't mean that other options don't exist. Microsoft had a monopoly on the PC operating system market, despite other options existing.
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KoftaBob 6y ago
How is that not a form of corporate espionage?
hodgesrm 6y ago
> "An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" The above statement may be "true" if you redefine what is confidential. The Amazon MNDA in past years basically said that they could use any information they remembered from the meeting. I read non-disclosures carefully. I've never seen anything like it.
- borski 6y ago
  This is called a residuals clause, and it’s increasingly common. Be really careful looking for these - I won’t sign a vague/broad one, unless I am out of options. (e.g., acquisition or fail)
  - hodgesrm 6y ago
    Ah, so that has a name? It was in the middle of the document in a fat paragraph. I was delighted to find it--kind of like picking up a big seashell on a crowded beach.
    - borski 6y ago
      https://www.everynda.com/blog/beware-residuals-clauses-nda/ https://www.everynda.com/blog/beware-residuals-clauses-nda/ We ended up signing it, but I went back and forth with their counsel to neuter this clause so that it was significantly safer: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in this Agreement, Recipient may use Residual Knowledge, subject to Provider’s valid patents, copyrights[, trade secrets], and mask work rights. [For the avoidance of doubt, no license is granted to the Recipient for any of Provider’s Confidential Information, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, or mask work rights.] "Residual Knowledge" means any information that is retained in the unaided memories of Recipient's Representatives who have had access to Confidential Information of Provider[, without specific or intentional memorization or reference to any written or electronic information or documentation. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Residual Knowledge may only be used for internal purposes by Recipient, and Recipient may not disclose Provider’s Confidential Information to third parties under any circumstance except as outlined elsewhere in this Agreement.] The parts in [ ] were added by me. We tried to neuter the clause as best we could; they really wanted to have one in there, for whatever reason, so my focus was on neutering it rather than arguing to remove it. There are always other concessions in a negotiation from the other side. :)
akerro 6y ago
Amazon does it also with popular independent sellers. I know a motorcycle shop that was selling top quality products. Amazon representative contacted him if he would like to sell on Amazon, showed him offers how to stock and sell items. Amazon started a brand with the same name and their products were higher in search, were poor quality China made, jackets that were falling apart within a year. For the same price! Angry consumers targeted their anger to the real website leaving negative comments, not on Amazon! Shop owner had to change his brand after 18 years of being in business, as legal battle against Amazon would cost him more than the business had in stock.
- pier25 6y ago
  This reminded me of the time Amazon started selling diapers at a loss to price-battle diapers.com. They won and ended up buying the parent company. https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-diapers-com-quidsi-soap-com https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...
  - TearsInTheRain 6y ago
    This is so wildly anti-competitive. I cant believe how many stories there are like this in this thread alone.
throwaway_aws 6y ago
A clarification: I'm talking about tactics from 2010-2014. I left in 2015.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  What I did not find from your post is in what manner are the data accessed. Is it at all publicly available? Is it metadata e.g. usage/billing? or is it production content like S3/lambda code/EC2 storage? It would be very helpful if you can clarify what kind of access it is.
pal_9000 6y ago
Just a word of caution regarding the throwaways in this thread. Take them for what they are, anecdotal claims
thoughtstheseus 6y ago
This is likely disingenuous. Large corporations like Amazon systematically refuse to sign NDAs with small players, hence none of the info is “confidential”. The rationale is that large companies might have people working on the idea already and they meet so many people/companies it would be restrictive for them to agree to any confidentiality.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  It is a reasonable expectation that your data is kept confidential. If my hosting provider were to so much as look at my data without my explicit permission I'd sue.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
That is straight up some Darth Vader shit.
ctvo 6y ago
A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself. The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care about optimizing profit and are long term focused. Please provide evidence for your extraordinary claim.
- wolco 6y ago
  Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    > Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. 1. This article is behind paywall, but thanks for posting. 2. EVERYONE should ask for evidence for any/all unsubstantiated claims, no matter where on the opinion spectrum they sit.
    - tekknik 6y ago
      It also uses AMP, thanks for being part of the problem parent.
    - wolco 6y ago
      I'd like to ask for evidence for statement 2. This sounds more like your opinion than a substantiated claim. 1. Someone needs to pay the people who write stories. If proof is important you should not object to contributing to the people who work on your behalf.
  - webdva 6y ago
    > Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? I had made an oath to myself to not return to Hacker News and engage with the community after I was once temporally banned on Hacker News. But when I saw your stupid comment and recognized its disingenuous manipulation and misinformation, a pushing of an evil and harmful narrative ultimately made for whatever reason you might have, I returned to Hacker News to downvote your comment. Thanks for creating a vulnerability in the world for me to exploit the loophole in my self-imposed oath that allows me to return. I'm back.
ekianjo 6y ago
> AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform How is that confidential information if it's hosted on their own servers?
lmeyerov 6y ago
I was on a business call with someone from AWS on a different topic, and it was pretty darn clear they opened up some sort of Account page that discussed our (limited) AWS usage, and were trying to infer a bunch about our business from that. It doesn't even really matter how deep that data goes - even just month-over-month billing #'s or something like compute/bandwidth consumption is super telling. We mostly only do CI type stuff there, so that didn't work so well for them, but if most of our revenue & operational use was through AWS, you bet I'd be worried about what they could infer.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Amazon and arguably google are in desperate need of a good anti-trust investigation.
QuinnyPig 6y ago
I’ve heard credible rumors of AWS teams using customer billing data to unpack what they’re doing in their accounts to inform competitive products.
daiwaka 6y ago
if you are ever of the mind to share, i am of the mind to listen. my email is dai.wakabayashi@nytimes.com
- ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
  Do you want to write an opinion piece on Shopify? I can get some minds to share
caralombardo 6y ago
Hi throwaway_aws: I'm one of the reporters and would like to hear more about your experience. Mind sending me an email at cara.lombardo@wsj.com so we can connect?

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bobbychairs 6y ago

Not trying to come across as judgemental. But if I may ask, did you at the time feel like that was an ethical thing to do?

throwaway_aws 6y ago
I joined after the team had gotten traction already. Both the GM and senior most product person on the team told me about their tactics independently. To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new things. On a day to day basis the only pressure was to build... I don't remember instances where ethical guidelines were brought up. So, in a way, the outcomes were a result of what people were rewarded on. Only after I left AWS I started thinking it was ethically iffy. I still believe Amazon is an amazing company and my time at AWS was one of the best learning experiences.
- kbenson 6y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I wish we went into this in much more detail in high school when covering economics and ethics (if the school even bothers to teach ethics). It should be a prerequisite in any capitalistic economy (but not only those, it can easily be extended to other things). I've also worked in industries that I think don't operate very ethically. It's amazing what you can ignore as an outlier because the alternative is uncomfortable or means you have to make a large personal change.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    A large personal change like going hungry? Not feeding your family?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Well, yeah. Or just having to look for a new job that may or may not pay as much. But I wasn't really going that far as saying people (myself, at one point, if you notice what I wrote) staying at a company they feel is acting unethically, but actually just noticing and accepting the company as doing unethical things instead of attributing it to an outlying situation that isn't indicative of how things are normally done. Companies and people sometimes do shitty things. It isn't always on purpose (misunderstandings, one bad person, etc), and there isn't always a good way to fix it afterwards. I don't condemn people and companies because of this, and there's a tendency to assume this when you see something and work at the company. It can take a while before you start seeing a pattern and accept that it might just be how things are done sometimes and the management is fine with it. If you don't have a lot of options, I think there's a tendency for people to not look closer either on purpose or subconsciously because they might not like what they find, and then they've put themselves in a harder situation, where they must choose between what they believe is right and a hardship. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and the human mind is very complex. That's all I'm saying.

bald 6y ago

> confidential information aka, we did not sign an NDA with the party across the table

Judgmentality 6y ago
This doesn't matter if you don't have the millions set aside to defend yourself in court against a giant conglomerate. Giant companies breaking NDAs with scrappy startups is a story I have heard often.
- jariel 6y ago
  This generally is not the case. If you blatantly ignore and NDA, and then make a lot of money from it, then the 'small startup' will have a ton of money because the prize is huge, i.e. a % cut to lawyers who can work pro-bono. Imagine you have a $10B company and some bonehead PM steals info from some small startup, for some stupid small project - it puts everything at risk. In most case, I think you have boneheaded actors, usually not acting in the best interest of the company.

former-aws 6y ago

Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.

rckoepke 6y ago
What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  Given how granular AWS billing data is, I would expect the odds to be fairly good that it alone is sufficient to make a good analysis for which third-party offerings are compelling markets. Then AWS takes their execution advantage, along with things like the lower friction that arises from first-party integration with IAM and billing, as well as not having to pay retail for the cloud resources, and it becomes very difficult to retain a moat unless you have a paradigm or perspective that is both critical to succeeding and is also incompatible with AWS culture.
  - QuinnyPig 6y ago
    You’re correct. It’s disturbingly detailed as far as what it reveals about architecture.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.

arprocter 6y ago

Interesting Previous discussion of Amazon releasing a Basics version of an item at half the price: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973

ggl_thorwaway 6y ago

When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us. Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.

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former-googler 6y ago
Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art. Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees". If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal. Disclaimer: former googler.
- paulgb 6y ago
  Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent. There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen one solution. That doesn't seem like a strong enough reason for a blanket policy. IANAL but this confuses me.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Just ... wow. This is an egregious abuse of monopoly power and is exactly the kind of thing that antitrust laws are supposed to address. I was certainly naive when I heard about other big retailers who would refuse to allow any subcontractors to use AWS. "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess.

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TimSchumann 6y ago
> "Surely Amazon has a Chinese wall" to prevent that kind of data sharing, I thought. Never underestimate the lack of morals in business is the right answer I guess. It’s remarkable to me how many competent programmers with years or decades experience in this industry don’t understand —- If you’re using AWS, Amazon has access to ALL of the data you put on AWS. Not that they 'can' or 'want to', given the current state of technology they absolutely have to have access to all your data for AWS to function. There isn’t currently a feasible technical way to work around this. And to head off all the ‘but FHE’ comments, see the ‘currently feasible’ above.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I'm not talking about not having any access in the technical sense. I'm talking about a "Chinese wall" whereby people who work for AWS supporting customers should absolutely not be able to inform any of the teams that build new Amazon services. These types of Chinese walls exist in many different industries, perhaps most famously finance, and when these walls have been "breached" in the past it has resulted in huge scandals.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    I think your understanding is true, unless the claimant elaborate what those data is and how his team got it, I do not understand how it would have worked. Access records for public services have a very detailed iam audit trail that logs people who accessed what at what time, and service teams don't get to just jump around that. Maybe they can see some metadata but certainly not actual data in an S3 bucket somewhere.

jacquesm 6y ago

Wow. I understand you do this as a throwaway but if true this is very bad stuff and it would be nice to have a lot more substantiation so that it could be verified.

ceedan 6y ago
If you're building a competing product and using a monopoly in order to price gouge - nothing is throwaway.
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  The HN account is a throwaway, that's what they're talking about.
throwaway_aws 6y ago
I wish I could reveal team and product name... but that would be a career suicide. I'm not asking you to believe what I'm saying... but I truly am sharing my experience. I'd encourage you to talk to folks you know from AWS who were there for last 8-10 years.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Are you still with Amazon?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

NicoJuicy 6y ago

And that's why existing businesses joining the cloud pick azure.

atarian 6y ago
What makes you think Microsoft would behave differently?
- xnyan 6y ago
  They are not as competent at sherlocking as Amazon.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    What a wonderful verb; thanks for relieving my ignorance. ISTM Amazon misses out on some aspects of the idiomatic definition, since they failed to popularize their own brand of client machines with an OS they control. I think the original Netscape folks would disagree with your assessment of M$ sherlocking competence.
- mhoad 6y ago
  I presume it would be a lack of history doing the exact thing amazon are accused of doing here? That and the fact that they aren’t doing an e-commerce business in the way Amazon is.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Since Microsoft has always known to threat their business partners fair.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

bdefore 6y ago

Would Amazon be more, less, or equally liable if you used a cloud provider that then relied upon AWS for its hosting. How would a startup that was concerned of Amazon copying it be certain to avoid such surveillance other than running its own data center?

gaogao 6y ago

There's a House of Reps. hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power next Monday with Bezos attending. If anyone has some staffer friends, could be a good line of questioning to poke them about.

thetinguy 6y ago
Please do this. The only way people like Bezos are held accountable are from people speaking up.

cheez 6y ago

Funny... I have software that combines well with something that has an online app store. They've been begging me to put my stuff in there. Nothing doing, I seen how you guys have embraced and extinguished others. They just took out their biggest app on the app store with their own version.

divbzero 6y ago

This echoes the distrust felt by many Amazon Marketplace sellers that drives them to seek alternatives like Shopify.

ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
Shopify is way way worse than Amazon. If you think Amazon is evil, Shopify is 10 steps ahead. It's not just my experience. Talking to startups and warehouses in Canada, the stories are all about how Shopify invites for friendly talks and then stonewalls you once they have got the required information

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

As it happens, the Congresswoman who represents the part of Seattle that contains Amazon is on the House Judiciary committee, and may also very well be your member of Congress. Seems like something her office would probably want to know about if you could substantiate the claim. https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congressional-delegation-contacts/representative-pramila-jayapal/ https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres... (ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS and District Director's email addresses.)

rattray 6y ago
It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying. It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.
- Kudos 6y ago
  I'm not super familiar with antitrust laws, but it feels like they might apply here.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    Is AWS a monopoly?
    - pixelbash 6y ago
      Isn't the important factor whether it's trying to become one? Windows and IE were never the only possible options.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        A de facto monopoly doesn't mean that other options don't exist. Microsoft had a monopoly on the PC operating system market, despite other options existing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

KoftaBob 6y ago

How is that not a form of corporate espionage?

hodgesrm 6y ago

> "An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" The above statement may be "true" if you redefine what is confidential. The Amazon MNDA in past years basically said that they could use any information they remembered from the meeting. I read non-disclosures carefully. I've never seen anything like it.

borski 6y ago
This is called a residuals clause, and it’s increasingly common. Be really careful looking for these - I won’t sign a vague/broad one, unless I am out of options. (e.g., acquisition or fail)
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  Ah, so that has a name? It was in the middle of the document in a fat paragraph. I was delighted to find it--kind of like picking up a big seashell on a crowded beach.
  - borski 6y ago
    https://www.everynda.com/blog/beware-residuals-clauses-nda/ https://www.everynda.com/blog/beware-residuals-clauses-nda/ We ended up signing it, but I went back and forth with their counsel to neuter this clause so that it was significantly safer: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in this Agreement, Recipient may use Residual Knowledge, subject to Provider’s valid patents, copyrights[, trade secrets], and mask work rights. [For the avoidance of doubt, no license is granted to the Recipient for any of Provider’s Confidential Information, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, or mask work rights.] "Residual Knowledge" means any information that is retained in the unaided memories of Recipient's Representatives who have had access to Confidential Information of Provider[, without specific or intentional memorization or reference to any written or electronic information or documentation. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Residual Knowledge may only be used for internal purposes by Recipient, and Recipient may not disclose Provider’s Confidential Information to third parties under any circumstance except as outlined elsewhere in this Agreement.] The parts in [ ] were added by me. We tried to neuter the clause as best we could; they really wanted to have one in there, for whatever reason, so my focus was on neutering it rather than arguing to remove it. There are always other concessions in a negotiation from the other side. :)

akerro 6y ago

Amazon does it also with popular independent sellers. I know a motorcycle shop that was selling top quality products. Amazon representative contacted him if he would like to sell on Amazon, showed him offers how to stock and sell items. Amazon started a brand with the same name and their products were higher in search, were poor quality China made, jackets that were falling apart within a year. For the same price! Angry consumers targeted their anger to the real website leaving negative comments, not on Amazon! Shop owner had to change his brand after 18 years of being in business, as legal battle against Amazon would cost him more than the business had in stock.

pier25 6y ago
This reminded me of the time Amazon started selling diapers at a loss to price-battle diapers.com. They won and ended up buying the parent company. https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-diapers-com-quidsi-soap-com https://www.vox.com/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-down-...
- TearsInTheRain 6y ago
  This is so wildly anti-competitive. I cant believe how many stories there are like this in this thread alone.

throwaway_aws 6y ago

A clarification: I'm talking about tactics from 2010-2014. I left in 2015.

Aperocky 6y ago
What I did not find from your post is in what manner are the data accessed. Is it at all publicly available? Is it metadata e.g. usage/billing? or is it production content like S3/lambda code/EC2 storage? It would be very helpful if you can clarify what kind of access it is.

pal_9000 6y ago

Just a word of caution regarding the throwaways in this thread. Take them for what they are, anecdotal claims

thoughtstheseus 6y ago

This is likely disingenuous. Large corporations like Amazon systematically refuse to sign NDAs with small players, hence none of the info is “confidential”. The rationale is that large companies might have people working on the idea already and they meet so many people/companies it would be restrictive for them to agree to any confidentiality.

jacquesm 6y ago
It is a reasonable expectation that your data is kept confidential. If my hosting provider were to so much as look at my data without my explicit permission I'd sue.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

That is straight up some Darth Vader shit.

ctvo 6y ago

A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself. The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care about optimizing profit and are long term focused. Please provide evidence for your extraordinary claim.

wolco 6y ago
Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...
- Aperocky 6y ago
  > Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. 1. This article is behind paywall, but thanks for posting. 2. EVERYONE should ask for evidence for any/all unsubstantiated claims, no matter where on the opinion spectrum they sit.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    It also uses AMP, thanks for being part of the problem parent.
  - wolco 6y ago
    I'd like to ask for evidence for statement 2. This sounds more like your opinion than a substantiated claim. 1. Someone needs to pay the people who write stories. If proof is important you should not object to contributing to the people who work on your behalf.
- webdva 6y ago
  > Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon? I had made an oath to myself to not return to Hacker News and engage with the community after I was once temporally banned on Hacker News. But when I saw your stupid comment and recognized its disingenuous manipulation and misinformation, a pushing of an evil and harmful narrative ultimately made for whatever reason you might have, I returned to Hacker News to downvote your comment. Thanks for creating a vulnerability in the world for me to exploit the loophole in my self-imposed oath that allows me to return. I'm back.

ekianjo 6y ago

> AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform How is that confidential information if it's hosted on their own servers?

lmeyerov 6y ago

I was on a business call with someone from AWS on a different topic, and it was pretty darn clear they opened up some sort of Account page that discussed our (limited) AWS usage, and were trying to infer a bunch about our business from that. It doesn't even really matter how deep that data goes - even just month-over-month billing #'s or something like compute/bandwidth consumption is super telling. We mostly only do CI type stuff there, so that didn't work so well for them, but if most of our revenue & operational use was through AWS, you bet I'd be worried about what they could infer.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Amazon and arguably google are in desperate need of a good anti-trust investigation.

QuinnyPig 6y ago

I’ve heard credible rumors of AWS teams using customer billing data to unpack what they’re doing in their accounts to inform competitive products.

daiwaka 6y ago

if you are ever of the mind to share, i am of the mind to listen. my email is dai.wakabayashi@nytimes.com

ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
Do you want to write an opinion piece on Shopify? I can get some minds to share

caralombardo 6y ago

Hi throwaway_aws: I'm one of the reporters and would like to hear more about your experience. Mind sending me an email at cara.lombardo@wsj.com so we can connect?