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A comment on Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales. Parent comment

Re:Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales by helsinkiandrew on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:38AM (#27025629)
> "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS.

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.*

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Re:Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales by erikpukinskis on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:15AM (#27026146)
That’s why they used the words “this sort of thing” and not “this thing”.
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Re:Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales by wongarsu on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:45AM (#27025711)
AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.
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Re:Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales by tacker2000 on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:25PM (#27031624)
I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data
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Re:Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales by DaiPlusPlus on Monday May 03, 2021 @08:07PM (#27032538)
About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care.

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).

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