That's absolutely not the same thing lol. What Amazon did is unethical. What you are describing is illegal.
AWS terms do not assign their customers any rights to any physical computer. And the AWS customer agreement gives Amazon the authority to access your data for certain purposes.
I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone prosecuted under the CFAA for accessing a computer that they physically own and physically control. AWS is a service, not a computer rental.
> We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings, or as necessary to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.
The CFAA uses wording like "exceeds authorized access", which Amazon would absolutely be guilty of if they went into your database to spy on your product listings.
If they could go after Aaron Swartz for using authorized access in an unauthorized way, it seems likely it could be applied here.
Would a judge accept that argument? From me? No. From the lawyers Amazon can afford? I wouldn't be comfortable betting either way.
In this case, Amazon fully owns, possesses, and operates the "protected computer".
You'd have to successfully argue that Amazon fraudulently accessed their own computer. It might be possible, but I'm guessing it'd be a first.
The difference in Aaron's case is huge: he didn't own the computers that hosted JSTOR.
> The difference in Aaron's case is huge: he didn't own the computers that hosted JSTOR.
His access was authorized, though. They still threw CFAA at him.
You have to "exceed authorized access to a protected computer"
The CFAA is not a data protection law. It is a computer protection law.
> In practice, any ordinary computer has come under the jurisdiction of the law, including cellphones, due to the interstate nature of most Internet communication.
Maybe it is possible, but the consequences to answering 'yes' to this is pretty scary.
If I'm renting an apartment, my landlord can't install a camera in the bathroom, even if they're the owner of the building.
Ownership doesn't change the fact that the law says "exceeds authorized access". Amazon agrees to only access the computer I'm renting from them in very specific scenarios. If they violate that, it looks like a pretty clear CFAA violation.
> Amazon agrees to only access the computer I'm renting from them in very specific scenarios.
AWS provides compute services, they do not rent computers. They make this clear in their terms.
They demonstrate that legal ownership is not the same as the legal right to do whatever you want with what you own.
> AWS provides compute services, they do not rent computers. They make this clear in their terms.
Good luck hoodwinking a judge with that argument.
Which one do you rent?
Where is your rental agreement?
When did you first take possession?
Equal protection or application of computer crime law (perhaps, any law) in the USA is a fiction. It would be practically illegal to invent and run a web spider today, for instance, if they didn’t already exist as a concept. (France recently decided this was true for news link aggregation; Google must pay the newspapers for reproducing their headlines. I’m glad hosted RSS readers aren’t outlawed so far, but under these sorts of restrictive legal interpretations you could see how they might be. Google doing AMP, of course, gets a free pass.)
If you don’t believe me about the web spider thing, try making a complete download of Twitter for the purpose of making a tweet search index and see if you get to continue owning your house. (My theory is that Clearview is allowed to do it for Instagram because they’re using the database to provide services to law enforcement/military, so those groups want it to continue to exist free of prosecution.)
Bummer that actively collaborating with violent types like pigs and military seems to be the only way to avoid jail if you want to build large novel data systems with interesting public datasets today. This sort of freedom to experiment with new/neat algorithms over published documents got us Google; today these same companies will get you raided if you dare download/index their data. (Facebook’s idea famously started out scraping public yearbook photos. Try scraping Facebook now.)
one small counterpoint: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
RIP aaronsw
Now, indiscriminate access to your content might violate whatever commitments Amazon made to you in their terms of service; I have not read them for a long time and can't remember what the language is specifically. But that would not be a matter for the FBI.