If one has data on pricing and sales across retail and online channels on a national scale, how risky would a purchase of a retailer really be? Not much, as you can pivot towards high sales, high profit products without doubting your strategy
Target, Walmart & other retailers de-risked Amazon's purchase of wholefoods
They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would worry existing retailer, especially Target, who along with Borders was, IIRC, one of the noteworthy retailers that had been dependent on Amazon's earlier service.
Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant since they consider that the data stored on their services is their, and no warrant is required to search oneself.
Microsoft can not get a warrant in any case: they are not a law enforcement agency.
Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that.
There is no way they have any of Target's data.
Doesn't Reddit have a policy against secretly editing user's posts? Didn't precisely that happen during the election by an admin?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/25/reddit-ceo-a...
I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.
Then again, a director at Volkswagen agreed to intentionally cheat emissions tests, so perhaps an Amazon employee would be foolish enough to snoop on Target's data.
Absolutely correct. Mutually assured destruction[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
On the downside, they could lose their most profitable business unit.
Check out all the audits they go through. If you're an enterprise customer with this concern you can get access to those audit reports and see if it's one of the things being looked at by an independent third party.
Besides, all Target has to do is encrypt the data. Boom, non-factor.
It doesn't have to be a careful CEO decision. It could just be a curious engineer and someone in strategy who appreciates the data. That's probably how it started at VW, not with the board deciding that this is a wise strategy.
I am not saying that the Amazon board will authorize a change in strategy to dig into every customer data. But if I believed that companies internal audit were enough to prevent fraud, there would be no need for a banking regulator for instance.
I think it's totally healthy to maintain paranoia about AWS if you are competing against them.
Nonetheless with Amazon Marketplace they already habe a platform where they know every transaction, price and product from third parties.