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I mean, there’s these posts on Hacker News claiming to be from former AWS employees saying they stole customer data to launch competing services: https://news.y

I mean, there’s these posts on Hacker News claiming to be from former AWS employees saying they stole customer data to launch competing services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929959 There’s also mainstream reporting that Amazon employees used retail sales data to launch competing products: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its... Maybe the first story is fake and the second is real… but they both point to a “win at all costs” company culture where policies might be violated, even if it threatens trust in the platform and a PR problem when exposed.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
But those cases are very different too (I’m not trying to defend what they did). Talking to a startup then copying their product is douchy but not illegal. Using Amazon.com sales data is like looking at the public “top products in electronics” and selling your own version of the top sellers - I imagine all large retailers do something similar when deciding what products to make own versions of. Hacking computers, networks, or services of your competitors, even when running in you data center is just bad business.
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paranoidrobot 5y ago
> from former AWS employees saying they stole customer data to launch competing services You're reading that a lot differently than I am. The quoted post says: >AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products None of that reads, to me, as them having had to use confidential data to do any of these things. You can identify many organisations that are running on AWS without knowing anything about AWS accounts - blog posts, IP space, public code, social media comments from staff, linkedin and all sorts of other places will often reveal that. Scraping/finding customer lists can be done using research, too. I've spoken to Account Manager-types at places and they've often used various tools that scrape other public resources to identify customers of competing services. Swap out company names, and it's effectively what I've seen from a bunch of companies, without it delving into anything unethical.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

But those cases are very different too (I’m not trying to defend what they did). Talking to a startup then copying their product is douchy but not illegal. Using Amazon.com sales data is like looking at the public “top products in electronics” and selling your own version of the top sellers - I imagine all large retailers do something similar when deciding what products to make own versions of. Hacking computers, networks, or services of your competitors, even when running in you data center is just bad business.

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paranoidrobot 5y ago

> from former AWS employees saying they stole customer data to launch competing services You're reading that a lot differently than I am. The quoted post says: >AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products None of that reads, to me, as them having had to use confidential data to do any of these things. You can identify many organisations that are running on AWS without knowing anything about AWS accounts - blog posts, IP space, public code, social media comments from staff, linkedin and all sorts of other places will often reveal that. Scraping/finding customer lists can be done using research, too. I've spoken to Account Manager-types at places and they've often used various tools that scrape other public resources to identify customers of competing services. Swap out company names, and it's effectively what I've seen from a bunch of companies, without it delving into anything unethical.