Backfiring would imply things are changing or getting worse for them. And I'm certain that we're not at "peak Amazon."

Worse, Americans especially are becoming numb to top down abuses. Not only am I worrying that this is not backfiring, but I'm also worried about the precedent we're setting by being so tolerant to it.

Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in.

Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another.

It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.

It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere. Most of the margin is made at the point of manufacturing, by taking $1 overseas labor and selling it for $5. AmazonBasics and the other product are both made by the same labor, the same process, so the economics of what’s really going on are still in equilibrium.

But I understand (though not really sympathize with) the aspiring middleman trying to buy that $5 product and sell on Amazon being mad about doing, essentially, product discovery for Amazon. On the other hand nobody is forcing them to be middlemen.

You don’t have to launder cheap overseas labor at all. If the EU commission focused on the economics that mattered - the labor arb - the impact will be as large as you’re anticipating. It’s my opinion that the injustice of the offshore labor system is of far greater importance than some bullshit Amazon versus Some Aspiring EU Tech Company battle.

If someone wants their mobile phone data and photos to be private, they should make a compelling mobile os they control.

If someone wants a water supply that is not polluted with toxic runoff they should start their own waterworks, lay their own pipes, and potentially buy their own lake because some pollution is unremovable.

If someone wants not to be discriminated against they should start their own country.

You have to give me whatever I want or modify your behavior in whatever ways I insist upon, because the only alternative for me to get my demands met is by creating the product from scratch and/or starting my own country, which is of course absurd.

Technically this worked pretty well when we had unexplored continents. If Elon has his way, maybe we'll soon-ish have Mars.

Without any regulation to curtail this behavior, the end state seems like it will have to be Amazon owning the markets that have the best margins and the least risk. Competitors will die and Amazon will be able to increase prices to maximize their profits without needing to worry about being undercut. That sounds exactly like what anti monopoly legislation was written to protect against.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-amazon-s...

IMHO these websites should be disallowed to sell their own brands. (I wouldn't mind if physical retailers wouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands either.)

>Ya know what? I'm gonna make a thing that lets third party sellers sell their products and avail themselves of my burgeoning logistics network! It'll be so cash. I'll charge 'em pennies, they get to sell to a wide audience, I get use out of my logistics network, win-win.

Sounds like the start of some good ole fashion enterprise right?

>Hey, now that I got everyone on here, and since I'vegot all this seller data just lying around, we should do something with it. Charts, graphs, the whole shebang. Can charge extra or piecemeal to help people do more business, thereby enabling them to get more regular product flow, possibly even getting them to sign up and pay me for use of my logistics network to cache their stuff. I can turn around and offer supply reliability to end consumers, I can offer revenue stability and insight into invemtory profitability for my merchants, and I'm still making bank off my logistics network! Win-win-win for everyone around.

Still good, right?

>Hey, we got all this sales data laying around right? Why don't we aggregate it to see what's moving in the market overall so we can diversify into becoming a merchant competing in our own marketplace without any of the risk anyone else has to take because we have the ability to front-run commodity movement using info no one else has available to them at that level of abstraction oroverall visibility. Oh... Also, don't say 'Front-Run' because it'llmake the compliance and legal people upset, but it's totally what we're doing. Bonus point: with our scale, if we do find a winner, we can get in at rock bottom deals from the manufacturer, meaning we can ectract the value potential better than anyone else out there.. Sure, some of the merchants may lose out, but it's our platform, and their data is on our stuff right? Admin's priveleges. Besides, it isn't their sales data, we can just generate some anonymized non-vendor specifiic metadata to search using the web services we implement! Then it's our data not theirs!*

If you don't see where one of those three starts getting anti-competitive and abusive, you are waaaaaay too far down the slippery slope of the monopolist slip-n-slide.

The last one may be somewhat ham-fisted, but it's not far from some of the more... Fraught... conversations on the virtues and prickly points of business models with coworkers in the break room.

I assure you it does happen. Check out the GooglePay and ApplePay branding guides for similar examples of things that you read that make you go "Huh, is that why that's confidential? Because it tells you to do anti-competitiive things?"

Good luck finding a copy of course. You'll just need to find a poorly packed truck or something.

This seems to be very common. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-ci...

Unless I've grossly misread these articles, Amazon were using third-party seller data from sales on the Amazon.* websites.

The data was on their (Amazon.com) sales database (who sold how much of what, for how much). They weren't accessing (hacking) data hosted on AWS (a database hosted for an online shop not related to AWS)

Those two things are very different.

EDIT: To put this into perspective. Any store (online and offline) that has its own branded products, probably looks at sales of the existing non shop branded products and makes an own branded version when it looks like it will be successful ("Panasonic SD cards are selling well, and look like they have good margins so let's bring out our own version"). What Amazon is being accused of is using sales data from 3rd party sellers on Amazon.*

So yeah, I believe you.

(Amazon does have internal controls that do limit most users’ access, but he said was an SRE with “global” access, apparently - I’ve never worked for Bezos so I don’t know what Amazon’s access-security is really like).

Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer's CloudTrail trail. So the customer can audit when their information is accessed.

This report has 0 to do with AWS.

Same company, leadership and culture. If you compete with Amazon, or could compete, it would be pretty stupid to put your jewels on AWS.

Although I admit that this might not be as true anymore as it was a few years ago.

Apple continues to actively steer away from Samsung, anyway.

Being on AWS works for Netflix, Disney+, and a lot of other streaming services I won't mention. ESPN and Fox Sports both use AWS. A lot of incredibly visible companies that offer cloud storage white-label S3. Tons of game studios use AWS.

A lot of successful companies are pretty stupid I guess. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to refute conspiracy theories about AWS. You do you boo-boo.

Most retailers, even big ones, don’t have the money or expertise to do this like that. Of the few who do (Apple for instance) Amazon is keen in making sure that those companies are heard and has direct relationships with them, but that’s few and far between.

That’s my take on this

If AWS were caught sharing your data, with anyone, for any reason, it would be a gigantic mess of a problem. Forget 'competing with Amazon on Amazon' - we're talking about sensitive data of all kinds in every single line of business. It would destroy them.

Selling on Amazon, and then having sneaky Amazon PM's use your data against you is bad, but the quasi-same thing would exist in other retailers. Best Buy doesn't sell '3rd Party' so obviously all of their sales data is theirs, and I think that the expectations between '3rd Party' and not '3rd Party' Amazon may just be a little bit blurred.

I'm suspicious frankly about the distinction, because Amazon may very well believe that that data is theirs to look at anyhow.

But AWS has to be a different story, if not, it's going to hurt.

Those servers, at least, should be free from any of the snooping concerns folks have.

How much brand damage and lost of business to AWS (their most profitable organization) would they lose if this were to leak? The more prevalent their use of this AWS customer data, the higher the chance it gets leaked.

Why do you think Amazon, one of the most logical and data driven companies, would make such a bad business decision?

That's actually the point. So what if they're using "anonymous" or other indirect data? If "Amazon.com" might be benefiting from AWS data of any kind then it needs to be investigated as potentially anti-competitive.

All of that is ignoring the fact that any customer of size WILL be sharing details about their go-to-market with their AWS account team. Just because a random guy in support can't login to their systems doesn't mean their assigned architect doesn't know what their process workflow looks like and didn't help them design it...

AWS is certified to comply with a bunch of cloud/data standards/regulations such as HIPPA, PCI DSS and so on. Even if a single evidence is found that AWS is breaching them the consequences will be severe.

Also for Amazon as a whole it makes very little business sense to lose a AWS customer paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year just to gain some marginal advantage in retail space. Note that Amazon retail already is operating at the limit when it comes to having accurate sales information about its competitors. It has crawlers to scrape online data and employs hundreds of analysts to build multiple models. And it’s been on this for close to three decades. So trawling AWS customer data is net negative for Amazon. It doesn’t take much for competitors to move away to Azure of GCP.

So it’s in AWS’s best interest to be absolutely fool proof about not going anywhere near customer data. Dealing with business data is a whole lot different ball game compared to collecting tracking customer data like Google does. Businesses will be unforgiving.

The article says someone used data from Amazon(the online store), not AWS. You should absolutely use Azure(or GCP) if it makes more economic sense for you but migrating from AWS to Azure because of this may be an overreaction.

Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc).

The other part of it is why add to Amazon's profit margin when it's well known AWS likely subsidizes retail to a large extent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m also unsure how the explicit trust from the government (“consider that govcloud exists”) is somehow evidence for their untrustworthiness?