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Comment by mankash666 | Hacker News Reader

They're the system admins on all their managed databases. Think about it

Not that Target is well-known to be good at security, but if AWS was discovered snooping on their data that would probably be the end of their business. Not to mention the tsunami of lawsuits launched by other companies spooked by the scandal.

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.

> but if AWS was discovered snooping on their data that would probably be the end of their business. Not to mention the tsunami of lawsuits launched by other companies spooked by the scandal. I can't imagine any manager or engineer willing to risk their career doing so.

Absolutely correct. Mutually assured destruction[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

I can't imagine an engineer creating a Diesel engine designed for fraud. But it happened. I'd say that in a company with an aggressive business culture like Amazon this is only more likely.

What's the cost/benefit of them doing that to Target? On the upside they could see what's selling well, what margins they have, etc. What's the net value of that information to their retail unit? I'd say it's probably very small.

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.

Unless they use the cloud merely as storage, the key will have to reside in the cloud for their servers to do anything useful. So the data is never really encrypted to the cloud provider.

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.

> What's the cost/benefit of them doing that to Target? On the upside they could see what's selling well, what margins they have, etc. What's the net value of that information to their retail unit? I'd say it's probably very small.

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.

Where are the encryption keys? Probably back again in AWS?

The benefit, as the OP mentioned, is allowing them to de-risk certain growth strategies or investments.

I think it's totally healthy to maintain paranoia about AWS if you are competing against them.

and lose any credibility? Lets throw away our entire cloud revenue to look at the raw data rather then scraping the public site? Please. This is tin foil hat crazy

The public site doesn't give you the sales numbers.

Just ask your suppliers for those. It’s not overly secretive

If they do it there would be someine at some point who would leak information about this. And this will probably much worse than loosing some customers.

Nonetheless with Amazon Marketplace they already habe a platform where they know every transaction, price and product from third parties.

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