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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Meh, "hosted on AWS = I can't avoid Amazon" isn't a reasonable question, it's like "My dentist used Amazon to buy his pants = I can't Avoid Amazon". You aren't doing business with Amazon by visiting a site hosted on AWS, the site owner is, and you're doing business with them. If you don't want AWS to see your IP for some "no direct touching" reason, get a VPN.

Six Degrees Of Separation is a fun game, but I don't think it's useful for this kind of debate.

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The point of the article was to demonstrate that everyday consumer behavior is completely dependent on big tech. That these companies have become utilities. You're presuming that this was about privacy.

Everyone depends on everyone.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html

>The point of the article was to demonstrate that everyday consumer behavior is completely dependent on big tech.

yes but all it really demonstrates is that in an interconnected consumer society everyone is dependent on the biggest economic centers, go back 50 years and everyone was dependent on GE in the same way.

Everyday consumer behavior is completely dependent on Big Apparel. It's nearly impossible to buy groceries or other necessities without interacting with someone who wearing clothing made by one of the big five.

Going by the recent discussions about anti-competitive practices employed by Amazon against incumbents in any space that are hosted on AWS I'm not sure this concern is overblown. There's a reason some major competitors to Amazon (Walmart) refuse to do business with companies that host their stuff on AWS. At first I thought it was just being a sore loser, now I'm starting to understand it.

> You aren't doing business with Amazon by visiting a site hosted on AWS

But think the other way, if you don't support them, you should avoid sites using them _and communicate so_. "No sorry, I won't, that's an amazon IP."

When you load a webpage or an app that's hosted on AWS you give Amazon a lot of information about your browser, location, etc. They could very easily aggregate all of the AWS services you load things from to build a very detailed profile about you. If Amazon were being nefarious they could inspect the data in the packets you send across their network.

Using a site that's hosted on AWS === doing business with Amazon. It's just a very one-sided relationship where they get a ton of useful data and you get to load a JS app.

Imma need a citation for that. Yes, Amazon could do that, but the cloud providers are usually very clear about drawing a clear dividing line between their hosting businesses and consumer businesses, because enterprise customers are extremely sensitive to the slightest suggestion of their data being mined.

What about this, a mere three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962145

As if Amazon gets anything useful from your request log with AWS...

> When you load a webpage or an app that's hosted on AWS you give Amazon a lot of information about your browser, location, etc.

You can give them a lot, but you don't have to. Using a VPN and randomizing your browser user agent (if you even terminate SSL with an AWS service and not a VM run by the website owner).

It is only 1 degree of separation when your web browser opens an HTTP connection to an AWS server.

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