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Comment by islanderfun | Hacker News Reader

OT: I agree Google has become monster-ish. But when this talk comes up, I can't help but think Amazon is just as if not more of a monster.

Especially the employee horror stories and now slashing Whole Food prices. While its awesome for it's customers, I'm worried about long term effects.

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But Google has much more global power. Amazon is in Europe and other places too, but nowhere strong as in the United States. Google, on the other hand, has most of the world under its arm, besides China and maybe Russia.

I can easily choose to avoid Amazon - they aren't seeding the entire internet with sly tracking technologies. They are a logistics business that makes money by moving stuff from warehouses to customers.

Similarly Apple wants to sell you an iPhone and a laptop and Microsoft wants to sell you an office suite and a database. Real companies with real products and services. But Google's ONLY business is stealing and selling personal data.

Really? Go ahead and avoid anything hosted on or using AWS.

Might be a bit difficult, and you may reconsider Amazon's scale relative to Google.

A fair point but I've not seen even a hint that Amazon themselves are tracking me across AWS hosted services. Do you have any evidence or links?

I'm pretty sure companies would not be happy if they found out Amazon was tracking those companies' customers. If it got out, it would probably be huge. Not worth it for Amazon to do this.

The only practical way to do such tracking reliably would be to inject html into every page loaded from one of their CDN's. That would be visible to everyone, and they don't do this.

Hence, either they have fairly ineffective IP address based tracking, or no tracking at all.

They wont need to add cookies or anything like that. They can track you just by parsing the connection logs on their routers and switches. Also every thing that is billable is logged. So technically they are already tracking and recording every access across their network. It is impossible to verify if they actually do this without anyone leaking information that worked on the system.

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