Amazon is a company that cares about credibility above all else, plus word travels fast in software engineering circles. Seems unlikely they would risk snooping

Before AWS or their open marketplace model, Amazon provided e-commerce services for established brick-and-mortar retailers (basically, Amazon-run online shops under the established retailers’ names.)

They quite aggressively mined this for data that was used competitively for Amazon's own online retail operations. I'm not surprised that this combined with Amazon making a big move into brick and mortar retail would worry existing retailer, especially Target, who along with Borders was, IIRC, one of the noteworthy retailers that had been dependent on Amazon's earlier service.

Citation required

Realistically it would take a very small team to do this orthogonal to the rest of the aws team.

Do we know Amazon's policy on "peeking" into people's AWS data? I feel like they would have something against that in their ToS/Privacy Policy.

I don't know about Amazon but I remember Microsoft sneaking into personal hotmail accounts to find who was leaking information to the press.

Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant since they consider that the data stored on their services is their, and no warrant is required to search oneself.

>Microsoft issued a statement in justification saying that it didn't need a warrant

Microsoft can not get a warrant in any case: they are not a law enforcement agency.

Right. The actual statement actually said "court order".

That absolutely will not look at your data under any circumstance, even if you specifically ask them to.

Multiple times I was trying to troubleshoot an issue and asked them to "just log into the database" and they said they have very strict policies against that.

There is no way they have any of Target's data.

Customer service not doing it in front of a customer is a lot different than Amazon not doing it at all.

Doesn't Reddit have a policy against secretly editing user's posts? Didn't precisely that happen during the election by an admin?

It was Reddit's CEO:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/25/reddit-ceo-a...

This is naive - they don't need to look at your data to draw inferences from it, they can just monitor and analyze network traffic.

Peeking into data would be risky and could be detected. But evaluating server logs is possible without affecting the user. If you know what servers target.com uses and evaluate their load, you can probably learn a lot about their business.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.