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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 wh

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 6y 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 6y 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.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    There is no need for a conspiracy theory. The metadata that is _required_ to produce your monthly AWS bill reveals a ton of information about the success of your business and what is doing very well for you. Doing analytics on customer billing is something that Amazon has every reason to be doing, and what Amazon does with that information can be anticompetitive or not.
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      At a certain level of aggregation, metadata is AWS need-to-know for capacity planning etc or for account execs to understand the needs of their covered clients. There's definitely room for discussion over when what level of granularity is necessary and whether metadata at different levels of granularity should be shared with product vs. customer facing teams. That didn't seem to be what the GP comment was about though - 'mining data from AWS servers' sounded to me like a much more invasive approach to client data.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    > If it were true... and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. Why on earth would you think that? They did worse on their storefront, which has a much smaller migration burden than AWS, and while a few big brands made a stink and pulled out, it didn't even noticeably slow growth.
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      ... because it's a colossal breach of trust. AWS has an entire staff of people whose job it is to convince clients that they can be trusted to be a safe custodian of data that includes heavily regulated types of data. Doing this would blow a huge hole in that. Do you really think banks are going to stay in AWS if this happens? Do you really think Salesforce is going to be OK with it? Do you think they'd ever do any US Govt business again?
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        Yes, yes (to the extent of maintaining their business relationship), and yes. I think you vastly underestimate the power of apathy. 99% of their customers won't even think about it, 90% of the customers who do think about it won't weigh its importance strongly enough to even potentially impact their decision, and 90% of the remaining customers will be satisfied with some minor deflection, platitudes, and hand-waving. Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right, I just don't think you are.
  - sfifs 6y ago
    > 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. There's a pretty obvious way to achieve this risk mitigation which is by spinning off AWS into a completely separate company with separate management accountable to a separate board with separately traded shares and not sharing any offices, employees or infrastructure with Amazon retail.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    I don't see how this would be fundamentally different from what Facebook did with WhatsApp data ?
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Its always a conpiracy theory untill it happens, and then it becomes obvious all along. People who predicted the 2008 crash used to get tinfoil hats in the mail.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    > This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense. It's a conspiracy theory to believe that a company whose policy it is to not access data that is on their own platform, who was caught accessing said data, would violate such a policy?
shiftpgdn 6y ago
Yes, of course they do. There was a post on here about a year ago from someone in the "Amazon profitability team" that involved digging through customers AWS instances to see what they could learn or duplicate for Amazon.
- alias_neo 6y ago
  I'm more than a little disturbed by that response, can you back that bold accusation up with some references? I _need_ to read more about this (about to begin a migration to AWS, not retail though).
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazo... https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-stole-my-product-idea-and-took-over-my-listing/323388 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-s... https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allbirds-shoe-clone-copy-sneaker-206-collective-private-label https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allb... I can't find the most recent set of posts about peering into customer's AWS instances to research what they could copy but consider that govcloud exists.
    - wrboyce 6y ago
      Am I missing something or do none of these links even mention AWS? I’m also unsure how the explicit trust from the government (“consider that govcloud exists”) is somehow evidence for their untrustworthiness?
    - alias_neo 6y ago
      Thank you for the effort of posting those. Unfortunately they don't really indicate any data being taken from AWS specifically, all of the copying behaviour appears to be Amazon storefront copy-cat tactics. As for govcloud, it exists because regulatory requirements for running things for gov are more strict than your average user/business requires and such cloud offerings require certain levels of hardening and software security and assurances. I happen to work in the space so I understand the need for an alternative offering for government requirements. There's really nothing nefarious going on there and its more about govs not wanting to run alongside regular users. I see nothing concrete I could take to my superiors.

ghusbands 6y 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 6y 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.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  There is no need for a conspiracy theory. The metadata that is _required_ to produce your monthly AWS bill reveals a ton of information about the success of your business and what is doing very well for you. Doing analytics on customer billing is something that Amazon has every reason to be doing, and what Amazon does with that information can be anticompetitive or not.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    At a certain level of aggregation, metadata is AWS need-to-know for capacity planning etc or for account execs to understand the needs of their covered clients. There's definitely room for discussion over when what level of granularity is necessary and whether metadata at different levels of granularity should be shared with product vs. customer facing teams. That didn't seem to be what the GP comment was about though - 'mining data from AWS servers' sounded to me like a much more invasive approach to client data.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > If it were true... and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. Why on earth would you think that? They did worse on their storefront, which has a much smaller migration burden than AWS, and while a few big brands made a stink and pulled out, it didn't even noticeably slow growth.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    ... because it's a colossal breach of trust. AWS has an entire staff of people whose job it is to convince clients that they can be trusted to be a safe custodian of data that includes heavily regulated types of data. Doing this would blow a huge hole in that. Do you really think banks are going to stay in AWS if this happens? Do you really think Salesforce is going to be OK with it? Do you think they'd ever do any US Govt business again?
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Yes, yes (to the extent of maintaining their business relationship), and yes. I think you vastly underestimate the power of apathy. 99% of their customers won't even think about it, 90% of the customers who do think about it won't weigh its importance strongly enough to even potentially impact their decision, and 90% of the remaining customers will be satisfied with some minor deflection, platitudes, and hand-waving. Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right, I just don't think you are.
- sfifs 6y ago
  > 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. There's a pretty obvious way to achieve this risk mitigation which is by spinning off AWS into a completely separate company with separate management accountable to a separate board with separately traded shares and not sharing any offices, employees or infrastructure with Amazon retail.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  I don't see how this would be fundamentally different from what Facebook did with WhatsApp data ?
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Its always a conpiracy theory untill it happens, and then it becomes obvious all along. People who predicted the 2008 crash used to get tinfoil hats in the mail.
- mdoms 6y ago
  > This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense. It's a conspiracy theory to believe that a company whose policy it is to not access data that is on their own platform, who was caught accessing said data, would violate such a policy?

shiftpgdn 6y ago

Yes, of course they do. There was a post on here about a year ago from someone in the "Amazon profitability team" that involved digging through customers AWS instances to see what they could learn or duplicate for Amazon.

alias_neo 6y ago
I'm more than a little disturbed by that response, can you back that bold accusation up with some references? I _need_ to read more about this (about to begin a migration to AWS, not retail though).
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazo... https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-stole-my-product-idea-and-took-over-my-listing/323388 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-s... https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allbirds-shoe-clone-copy-sneaker-206-collective-private-label https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allb... I can't find the most recent set of posts about peering into customer's AWS instances to research what they could copy but consider that govcloud exists.
  - wrboyce 6y ago
    Am I missing something or do none of these links even mention AWS? I’m also unsure how the explicit trust from the government (“consider that govcloud exists”) is somehow evidence for their untrustworthiness?
  - alias_neo 6y ago
    Thank you for the effort of posting those. Unfortunately they don't really indicate any data being taken from AWS specifically, all of the copying behaviour appears to be Amazon storefront copy-cat tactics. As for govcloud, it exists because regulatory requirements for running things for gov are more strict than your average user/business requires and such cloud offerings require certain levels of hardening and software security and assurances. I happen to work in the space so I understand the need for an alternative offering for government requirements. There's really nothing nefarious going on there and its more about govs not wanting to run alongside regular users. I see nothing concrete I could take to my superiors.