Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here?
If the answer is anything other than "they definitely don't", I'm concerned.
If it were true that Amazon were taking sneaky peeks at data inside AWS related to retailers, and this became public, AWS as a business would be done.
The loud banging you'd be hearing would be the door closing as the last customer exited, followed by all the engineering staff who work on AWS as they see the writing on the wall.
Why would Amazon look to achieve some marginal advantage in its retail businesses at the risk of a total loss to one of its marquee businesses, AWS? It's an idiotic risk.
Why on earth would you think that? They did worse on their storefront, which has a much smaller migration burden than AWS, and while a few big brands made a stink and pulled out, it didn't even noticeably slow growth.
Doing this would blow a huge hole in that.
Do you really think banks are going to stay in AWS if this happens? Do you really think Salesforce is going to be OK with it? Do you think they'd ever do any US Govt business again?
Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right, I just don't think you are.
The metadata that is _required_ to produce your monthly AWS bill reveals a ton of information about the success of your business and what is doing very well for you.
Doing analytics on customer billing is something that Amazon has every reason to be doing, and what Amazon does with that information can be anticompetitive or not.
There's definitely room for discussion over when what level of granularity is necessary and whether metadata at different levels of granularity should be shared with product vs. customer facing teams.
That didn't seem to be what the GP comment was about though - 'mining data from AWS servers' sounded to me like a much more invasive approach to client data.
There's a pretty obvious way to achieve this risk mitigation which is by spinning off AWS into a completely separate company with separate management accountable to a separate board with separately traded shares and not sharing any offices, employees or infrastructure with Amazon retail.
People who predicted the 2008 crash used to get tinfoil hats in the mail.
It's a conspiracy theory to believe that a company whose policy it is to not access data that is on their own platform, who was caught accessing said data, would violate such a policy?
I _need_ to read more about this (about to begin a migration to AWS, not retail though).
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazo...
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-s...
https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allb...
I can't find the most recent set of posts about peering into customer's AWS instances to research what they could copy but consider that govcloud exists.
I’m also unsure how the explicit trust from the government (“consider that govcloud exists”) is somehow evidence for their untrustworthiness?
As for govcloud, it exists because regulatory requirements for running things for gov are more strict than your average user/business requires and such cloud offerings require certain levels of hardening and software security and assurances. I happen to work in the space so I understand the need for an alternative offering for government requirements. There's really nothing nefarious going on there and its more about govs not wanting to run alongside regular users. I see nothing concrete I could take to my superiors.