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?