There is no need for a conspiracy theory.

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.

At a certain level of aggregation, metadata is AWS need-to-know for capacity planning etc or for account execs to understand the needs of their covered clients.

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.

> 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.

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.

Its always a conpiracy theory untill it happens, and then it becomes obvious all along.

People who predicted the 2008 crash used to get tinfoil hats in the mail.

> If it were true... and this became public, AWS as a business would be done.

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.

... because it's a colossal breach of trust. AWS has an entire staff of people whose job it is to convince clients that they can be trusted to be a safe custodian of data that includes heavily regulated types of data.

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?

Yes, yes (to the extent of maintaining their business relationship), and yes. I think you vastly underestimate the power of apathy. 99% of their customers won't even think about it, 90% of the customers who do think about it won't weigh its importance strongly enough to even potentially impact their decision, and 90% of the remaining customers will be satisfied with some minor deflection, platitudes, and hand-waving.

Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right, I just don't think you are.

I don't see how this would be fundamentally different from what Facebook did with WhatsApp data ?

> This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense.

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?