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Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself th

by mk89 5y ago

Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can. PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go. And I totally support that. PPS: I don't understand the downvote. Please, be specific on why you disagree instead of just clicking on random symbols.

ahiknsr 5y ago
> I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go This seems to be very common. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-cio-we-picked-microsoft-for-huge-cloud-deal-to-accelerate-digital-transformation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-ci...
- nova22033 5y ago
  Amazon is a direct competitor so it makes sense for Walmart to not give them more money via AWS.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Everyone in retail is a direct competitor to Amazon. It makes sense for anyone with a physical storefront to avoid AWS.
anotha1 5y ago
Upvoted, but I disagree that it's backfiring. Backfiring would imply things are changing or getting worse for them. And I'm certain that we're not at "peak Amazon." Worse, Americans especially are becoming numb to top down abuses. Not only am I worrying that this is not backfiring, but I'm also worried about the precedent we're setting by being so tolerant to it.
- sharklazer 5y ago
  “Money talks and BS walks” Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in. Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another. It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.
  - an_opabinia 5y ago
    If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere. Most of the margin is made at the point of manufacturing, by taking $1 overseas labor and selling it for $5. AmazonBasics and the other product are both made by the same labor, the same process, so the economics of what’s really going on are still in equilibrium. But I understand (though not really sympathize with) the aspiring middleman trying to buy that $5 product and sell on Amazon being mad about doing, essentially, product discovery for Amazon. On the other hand nobody is forcing them to be middlemen. You don’t have to launder cheap overseas labor at all. If the EU commission focused on the economics that mattered - the labor arb - the impact will be as large as you’re anticipating. It’s my opinion that the injustice of the offshore labor system is of far greater importance than some bullshit Amazon versus Some Aspiring EU Tech Company battle.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      The issues with Amazon go further than this : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-sold-eclipse-glasses-that-cause-permanent-blindness/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-s... IMHO these websites should be disallowed to sell their own brands. (I wouldn't mind if physical retailers wouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands either.)
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
nova22033 5y ago
chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS The article says someone used data from Amazon(the online store), not AWS. You should absolutely use Azure(or GCP) if it makes more economic sense for you but migrating from AWS to Azure because of this may be an overreaction.
- sfifs 5y ago
  It's standard practice for any retailer to not use AWS. Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc). The other part of it is why add to Amazon's profit margin when it's well known AWS likely subsidizes retail to a large extent.
  - alias_neo 5y ago
    I'm curious what kind of access Amazon would have to your data as a retailer running on AWS. Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here? If the answer is anything other than "they definitely don't", I'm concerned.
    - ghusbands 5y ago
      Nobody can know for sure. Whether or not they were secretly mining data from AWS servers, they would say they don't and nobody on the outside would be able to tell. Even if it's unlikely, many people are simply choosing not to risk it.
      - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
        This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense. If it were true that Amazon were taking sneaky peeks at data inside AWS related to retailers, and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. The loud banging you'd be hearing would be the door closing as the last customer exited, followed by all the engineering staff who work on AWS as they see the writing on the wall. Why would Amazon look to achieve some marginal advantage in its retail businesses at the risk of a total loss to one of its marquee businesses, AWS? It's an idiotic risk.
whoknew1122 5y ago
Amazon != AWS. As someone who has access to customer data in AWS, I'm very limited in what information I can access (to the point where it actively makes my job in Premium Support harder than it would be otherwise). I also have to provide a legitimate business reason for access to data. Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer's CloudTrail trail. So the customer can audit when their information is accessed. This report has 0 to do with AWS.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > This report has 0 to do with AWS Same company, leadership and culture. If you compete with Amazon, or could compete, it would be pretty stupid to put your jewels on AWS.
  - alex_anglin 5y ago
    On the other hand, it seems to be working out pretty well for Netflix.
  - whoknew1122 5y ago
    Different leadership and largely different culture. Or are you just making assumptions? Being on AWS works for Netflix, Disney+, and a lot of other streaming services I won't mention. ESPN and Fox Sports both use AWS. A lot of incredibly visible companies that offer cloud storage white-label S3. Tons of game studios use AWS. A lot of successful companies are pretty stupid I guess. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to refute conspiracy theories about AWS. You do you boo-boo.
    - syops 5y ago
      I suggest that your reply would be much better without the last paragraph.
      - nvr219 5y ago
        hmmm, yes.
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
> "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Unless I've grossly misread these articles, Amazon were using third-party seller data from sales on the Amazon.* websites. The data was on their (Amazon.com) sales database (who sold how much of what, for how much). They weren't accessing (hacking) data hosted on AWS (a database hosted for an online shop not related to AWS) Those two things are very different. EDIT: To put this into perspective. Any store (online and offline) that has its own branded products, probably looks at sales of the existing non shop branded products and makes an own branded version when it looks like it will be successful ("Panasonic SD cards are selling well, and look like they have good margins so let's bring out our own version"). What Amazon is being accused of is using sales data from 3rd party sellers on Amazon.*
- wongarsu 5y ago
  AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.
- erikpukinskis 5y ago
  That’s why they used the words “this sort of thing” and not “this thing”.
- tacker2000 5y ago
  I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care. So yeah, I believe you. (Amazon does have internal controls that do limit most users’ access, but he said was an SRE with “global” access, apparently - I’ve never worked for Bezos so I don’t know what Amazon’s access-security is really like).
vishnugupta 5y ago
AWS and Amazon Retail are two different entities altogether. Even their infrastructure are at least logically siloed and my educated guess is even physically siloed in some places. AWS is certified to comply with a bunch of cloud/data standards/regulations such as HIPPA, PCI DSS and so on. Even if a single evidence is found that AWS is breaching them the consequences will be severe. Also for Amazon as a whole it makes very little business sense to lose a AWS customer paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year just to gain some marginal advantage in retail space. Note that Amazon retail already is operating at the limit when it comes to having accurate sales information about its competitors. It has crawlers to scrape online data and employs hundreds of analysts to build multiple models. And it’s been on this for close to three decades. So trawling AWS customer data is net negative for Amazon. It doesn’t take much for competitors to move away to Azure of GCP. So it’s in AWS’s best interest to be absolutely fool proof about not going anywhere near customer data. Dealing with business data is a whole lot different ball game compared to collecting tracking customer data like Google does. Businesses will be unforgiving.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bopbeepboop 5y ago
  Amazon is a customer of AWS, and leases most of their infrastructure from their subsidiary.
marvinblum 5y ago
I had the same thought a while ago. I remember when Amazon mostly acted as a retailer, and not as a marketplace. Nowadays I don't see why I shouldn't buy on ebay or somewhere else, as the marketplace approach negates what I liked about it: everything from one company, a single parcel, easy refunds. If I receive each item from a different retailer anyways, I don't see why I should feed the beast.

by mk89 5y ago

ahiknsr 5y ago

> I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go This seems to be very common. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-cio-we-picked-microsoft-for-huge-cloud-deal-to-accelerate-digital-transformation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-ci...

nova22033 5y ago
Amazon is a direct competitor so it makes sense for Walmart to not give them more money via AWS.
- freeone3000 5y ago
  Everyone in retail is a direct competitor to Amazon. It makes sense for anyone with a physical storefront to avoid AWS.

anotha1 5y ago

Upvoted, but I disagree that it's backfiring. Backfiring would imply things are changing or getting worse for them. And I'm certain that we're not at "peak Amazon." Worse, Americans especially are becoming numb to top down abuses. Not only am I worrying that this is not backfiring, but I'm also worried about the precedent we're setting by being so tolerant to it.

sharklazer 5y ago
“Money talks and BS walks” Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in. Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another. It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere. Most of the margin is made at the point of manufacturing, by taking $1 overseas labor and selling it for $5. AmazonBasics and the other product are both made by the same labor, the same process, so the economics of what’s really going on are still in equilibrium. But I understand (though not really sympathize with) the aspiring middleman trying to buy that $5 product and sell on Amazon being mad about doing, essentially, product discovery for Amazon. On the other hand nobody is forcing them to be middlemen. You don’t have to launder cheap overseas labor at all. If the EU commission focused on the economics that mattered - the labor arb - the impact will be as large as you’re anticipating. It’s my opinion that the injustice of the offshore labor system is of far greater importance than some bullshit Amazon versus Some Aspiring EU Tech Company battle.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    The issues with Amazon go further than this : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-sold-eclipse-glasses-that-cause-permanent-blindness/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-s... IMHO these websites should be disallowed to sell their own brands. (I wouldn't mind if physical retailers wouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands either.)
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago

nova22033 5y ago

chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS The article says someone used data from Amazon(the online store), not AWS. You should absolutely use Azure(or GCP) if it makes more economic sense for you but migrating from AWS to Azure because of this may be an overreaction.

sfifs 5y ago
It's standard practice for any retailer to not use AWS. Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc). The other part of it is why add to Amazon's profit margin when it's well known AWS likely subsidizes retail to a large extent.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I'm curious what kind of access Amazon would have to your data as a retailer running on AWS. Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here? If the answer is anything other than "they definitely don't", I'm concerned.
  - ghusbands 5y ago
    Nobody can know for sure. Whether or not they were secretly mining data from AWS servers, they would say they don't and nobody on the outside would be able to tell. Even if it's unlikely, many people are simply choosing not to risk it.
    - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense. If it were true that Amazon were taking sneaky peeks at data inside AWS related to retailers, and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. The loud banging you'd be hearing would be the door closing as the last customer exited, followed by all the engineering staff who work on AWS as they see the writing on the wall. Why would Amazon look to achieve some marginal advantage in its retail businesses at the risk of a total loss to one of its marquee businesses, AWS? It's an idiotic risk.

whoknew1122 5y ago

Amazon != AWS. As someone who has access to customer data in AWS, I'm very limited in what information I can access (to the point where it actively makes my job in Premium Support harder than it would be otherwise). I also have to provide a legitimate business reason for access to data. Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer's CloudTrail trail. So the customer can audit when their information is accessed. This report has 0 to do with AWS.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> This report has 0 to do with AWS Same company, leadership and culture. If you compete with Amazon, or could compete, it would be pretty stupid to put your jewels on AWS.
- alex_anglin 5y ago
  On the other hand, it seems to be working out pretty well for Netflix.
- whoknew1122 5y ago
  Different leadership and largely different culture. Or are you just making assumptions? Being on AWS works for Netflix, Disney+, and a lot of other streaming services I won't mention. ESPN and Fox Sports both use AWS. A lot of incredibly visible companies that offer cloud storage white-label S3. Tons of game studios use AWS. A lot of successful companies are pretty stupid I guess. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to refute conspiracy theories about AWS. You do you boo-boo.
  - syops 5y ago
    I suggest that your reply would be much better without the last paragraph.
    - nvr219 5y ago
      hmmm, yes.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

> "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Unless I've grossly misread these articles, Amazon were using third-party seller data from sales on the Amazon.* websites. The data was on their (Amazon.com) sales database (who sold how much of what, for how much). They weren't accessing (hacking) data hosted on AWS (a database hosted for an online shop not related to AWS) Those two things are very different. EDIT: To put this into perspective. Any store (online and offline) that has its own branded products, probably looks at sales of the existing non shop branded products and makes an own branded version when it looks like it will be successful ("Panasonic SD cards are selling well, and look like they have good margins so let's bring out our own version"). What Amazon is being accused of is using sales data from 3rd party sellers on Amazon.*

wongarsu 5y ago
AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.
erikpukinskis 5y ago
That’s why they used the words “this sort of thing” and not “this thing”.
tacker2000 5y ago
I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care. So yeah, I believe you. (Amazon does have internal controls that do limit most users’ access, but he said was an SRE with “global” access, apparently - I’ve never worked for Bezos so I don’t know what Amazon’s access-security is really like).

vishnugupta 5y ago

AWS and Amazon Retail are two different entities altogether. Even their infrastructure are at least logically siloed and my educated guess is even physically siloed in some places. AWS is certified to comply with a bunch of cloud/data standards/regulations such as HIPPA, PCI DSS and so on. Even if a single evidence is found that AWS is breaching them the consequences will be severe. Also for Amazon as a whole it makes very little business sense to lose a AWS customer paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year just to gain some marginal advantage in retail space. Note that Amazon retail already is operating at the limit when it comes to having accurate sales information about its competitors. It has crawlers to scrape online data and employs hundreds of analysts to build multiple models. And it’s been on this for close to three decades. So trawling AWS customer data is net negative for Amazon. It doesn’t take much for competitors to move away to Azure of GCP. So it’s in AWS’s best interest to be absolutely fool proof about not going anywhere near customer data. Dealing with business data is a whole lot different ball game compared to collecting tracking customer data like Google does. Businesses will be unforgiving.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bopbeepboop 5y ago
Amazon is a customer of AWS, and leases most of their infrastructure from their subsidiary.

marvinblum 5y ago

I had the same thought a while ago. I remember when Amazon mostly acted as a retailer, and not as a marketplace. Nowadays I don't see why I shouldn't buy on ebay or somewhere else, as the marketplace approach negates what I liked about it: everything from one company, a single parcel, easy refunds. If I receive each item from a different retailer anyways, I don't see why I should feed the beast.