This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data.
> If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters.
That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in Amazon, not some technology that provides any assurances, much less proof, they're not looking at your data.
They can pull the curtain off anything you're running in their cloud, at any time they feel like it. It has to work this way for AWS to be of any use, and by using AWS you're implicitly trusting Amazon with your data.
It's the difference between breaking into a Walmart with a ski mask and assault rifle and stealing a bunch of blu rays vs recording the HDMI out from whatever device you stream Netflix from. They're not the same thing at all, either in terms of harm done, applicable criminal law, or ability to build a compelling civil lawsuit.
For a thought exercise, let's play this out.
Amazon copies data running through VMs (or grabs it from storage).
Let's assume it isn't on hardware certified for capital-letter processing [1], most of which require regular third party audits.
So they have your illegally-obtained data [2], which presumably they want to use to make money.
Except they can't leave any record of its source, in any documented form. This includes server logs, data transfers, emails about data, meeting minutes about data.
So they create some isolated network, run by a third party contractor, that transfers encrypted data from the taps to a store, then decrypts. All of which brings us to the most difficult part.
Who does... what with it?
The source data itself is radioactive. Who knows when "pricing strategy for company X" or obvious equivalent might pop up in the stream?
So you... what? Exclusively touch it via algorithm that outputs only aggregate information? How do you possibly code and maintain that pipeline, sight unseen?
All while risking an incredibly profitable business.
Or, you know, you just operate as an honest IaaS provider and make $10B in revenue / quarter with a 25% growth rate...
The unit could be the "open sales modeling unit" that just supplies one data feed among thousands.
They can certainly take the risk. If crimes only happened when there was a 0% change of getting caught there would be no crime.
> If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it in a civil suit.
If Amazon were doing this and profiting from it, that would essentially be a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the leadership of the company. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? I tend to think conspiracy theories are rarely true. Would it be caught? I believe it would likely be caught.
Companies get things done by having meetings, informing their hierarchy, and following executive decisions. In what meeting do you imagine this being discussed? Who floats this idea, and who signs off on it? I just don't see it happening. And if it does, I expect whistleblowers to put a stop to it.
Actually, they are quite uncommon, which is why they make headlines when discovered.
I'm not taking a side here, just pointing out a fallacy.
Bezos is making the most money of everyone living. Many of the scandals happen when the founder is retired or dead.
Boeing:
See 737 MAX, other 737 boondoggle like the vertical stabilizer reversal back in 94'ish.
Monsanto, hell, what chemical hasn't hid information they damn well shouldn't:
Dicamba, roundup.. Take your pick. The stellar behavior of this corporate citizen taints cements the stereotype of an entire industry.
https://thecounter.org/dicamba-trial-monsanto-basf-pesticide...
https://www.phillyvoice.com/new-york-times-dupont-hid-decade...
Special mention goes to a certain German pharma company who brought you Thalidomide:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCnenthal_GmbH
The lovely folks at Insys:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/health/insys-trial-verdic...
Believe there was a fraudulent implant thing a bit ago... Where'd I put that?
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/health/2014/07/09/south...
Someone beat me to Dieselgate.
Arthur Anderson LLP.
PG&E deliberately skimped on maintenance, leading to fires in California, and if I recall natural gas lines overpressuring in Massachusets?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_gas_explosions
Excuse me, the natural gas one was Columbia Gas.
Big Tobacco...
Nestle I think getting caught using child labor in their supply chain at one point.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Oh what else can I think of off the top of my head? Uhhh...
That's all I can think of for right now. I mean we can hit the history books or case law to get a solid count I suppose, but to be frank, once a company hits a certain revenue point, it is pretty much guaranteed they've had to do something to get dirty/avoid getting outed as dirty.
So it really isn't that unusual. Throw in stuff that happened back before the rise of the Unions of the last century, and since their decline, and you also end up with so.e decent stories of workforce abuse. Though admittedly there's slant depending on who is telling it.
Like the Pinkertons as a matter of fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_%28detective_agency%...
Or the original incarnation of Equifax, who were tasked with vetting prospective executive promotees.
Just because it'sorganized doesn't mean it's doing anyone any favors.
I stand by my statement -- it is rare.
I know of a case of fraud in oil well lease payouts, someone was stealing a small from a large number of leases and had been doing so for years.
A company auditor caught it. Did they go to the police? No. They paid the guy to leave the company and never talk about it again. The guy might have stolen hundreds of thousands in the process, but the company knew they'd lose millions, just from clients demanding audits going decades back. It was easier and cheaper to cover up and never mention again.
The very least we can say is that company malpractice is more common than it appears, unless 100% of it is reported on.
As has been mentioned as well is that governmental/regulatory apparata are typically starved of funding, so must limit their investigation/scrutiny to likely the most obvious cases.
Furthermore, if you've just entered into white collar circles these last few years, you may have been surprised at a tendency to not write things down. This isn't just people not realizing it is a good idea to do so, but a conscious decision in many cases due to eDiscovery, and the effects it has on provability in a court of law.
Pay attention on HN, and you'll get little snippets of other cases of "tribal skeletons" every now and again.
Anyway, by all means, I'm not necessarily arguing against your point; merely stating that given the sample size, and keeping in mind that regulators/the media can only dig up so much muck given limited manpower; it is not prudent to assume there isn't wrongdoing where no one has looked yet. I used to hold the same view you espouse; then I started A)cataloging things and B) noticed how often settlements seem to be applied with no admission of wrong doing.
Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of the non-existence thereof. You just haven't found it yet.
Can't believe I forgot about Wells Fargo, btw. That whole mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
ISP's have been known to falsify their Form 477 data fabricating coverage stats, and overcharging customers:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/complaints-att-directv-bundled-...
https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/verizon-wireless/nation...
There's plenty more where that came from with every ISP to be honest.
FTC keeps stats on all enforcement actions apparently. Might be a decent place to start looking to get some solid numbers.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/
Mind that that's only the ones. I assume CFPB and other commissions have similar, but do keep in mind they can't be everywhere or investigate everyone. So without stats on how many actions are dropped by prosecutorial/investigator's discretion, it is actually difficult to make really solid claims as to the actual frequency of malfeasance. Further, from my social circle's anecdata, it seems to be a safe bet that just about every organization at least has something in the the way of "muck they've cleaned up after" without getting authorities involved.
Anyway... I've rambled enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
main thing here is that in big corps you can divide big (evil) task into smaller steps which could be defined as non-evil in isolation, and nobody in actual implementation people crowd would understand big picture.
I'm ready to watch that movie
For one, banks are far more regulated than Amazon is. If governments funded departments with 10s or 100s of thousands of employees monitoring and regulating cloud computing services, then it might be similar.
But the most significant difference is that if the bank seizes my money, I'll know about it pretty quickly and can respond. If Amazon sniffs through my commercial data, I'm unlikely to ever know. Most people are far more tempted to do wrong if they know if the chances of getting caught are miniscule.
How else do you think "closed-loop" measurement of marketing effectiveness, and retargeting based on purchase behavior are done? How else do you think suppliers can pull a D&B report on your company showing your bank account balances?
A valuable if painful lesson to learn. I still do all my personal banking with a credit union and consider my relationship with banks to be adversarial. They only own my debt, never my cash.
Is that an exaggeration? It amounts to $100 or $50 a month in "low balance fee"!
All the banks I've looked at had a fee under $10.
Similarly, if you're presenting externally, it's a good idea to close open applications that are not relevant to prevent info leaks from Alt-Tabbing.
Actually having a competitor pay someone to come into your office to pick locks etc. is rare, comes with criminal liability and is easily detectable on security cameras.
That's not true. I surely don't trust banks, but at least they're regulated to the point that they have to come up with some legal pretense for seizing my funds. A bodyguard is ostensibly a person who I've incentivized more than the competition to not harm me, and who I probably form a relationship with over time. None of these things are true of Amazon.
> Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.
What part of using data that you have on your competitors but they don't have on you, to sell competing products on a platform where you don't have to pay fees but they do, sounds like a competitive marketplace?
Then again, compared to the average bear, maybe I'm unusually circumspect when it comes to all of those things.
If for example I'm fully on amazon AWS for everything, DNS/DB/Web then no matter how encrypted your data is Amazon still has a very good idea of the effectiveness of your campaign. You can't hide the number of DNS queries. You can't hide the number of TCP SYNs. Hell, there is just a huge amount of things that encryption does not cover up, especially involving time for particular transactions to occur.
Amazon, if they wanted, could read stats from Netflix’s database about which movies drive the most engagement and use that to determine what to license for Prime video.
It’s the difference between root on the server and capturing encrypted packets on a network.
How many PayPal horror stories have there been?
(Well, it seems like SGX is insecure right now with all of the CPU vulnerabilities, but in principle it may be fixed in a future generation and be well-suited for this.)
The fact that you wouldn't have to trust your host specifically could have a real decentralizing effect for cloud hosting: people would be able to run stuff on any cloud host without needing to trust them much. If you just wanted compute power and didn't care about strong uptime/connectivity, you could even safely rent cheap VMs on computers of random individuals.
AMD SEV, on the other hand, is exactly that.
This is true, but it doesn't have to be this way [1].
Now things may have changed since then, but I'd imagine it's not yet gotten down to 1.X inefficiency multiplier regardless of the FHE scheme you're using.
As an aside, Amazon competitors like Walmart typically require their suppliers to host data on a platform other than AWS if they want access.
If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters.
EDIT: fix typo.