Amazon's product people also don't look at third party seller statistics to decide which products to sell themselves. Until they got caught doing just that.
To assume that they don't look at data feels naive.
A German super market chain with online ambitions has a rule that nothing touching their pipeline can be hosted on AWS. Want to sell them SaaS? You can't run your nodes on AWS. I consider that to be reasonable.
That's completely different and separate issue from AWS customer data (for example someone running e-commerce software on a linux VM).
3rd party seller sales pay Amazon commission on each sale - deciding which products are selling well is just a matter of Amazon doing a SQL call on their own sales database (much like a physical retailer may see what brands/products are selling well)
We built are service in similar vain. Nothing can reside under authority on non-EU entity, and nothing can be hosted on servers owned by non-EU entity. This effectively removed AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba.
And still, we had plenty of choice.
We specifically picked “boring” cloud provider. No thrills cloud vendor which has core business in building infrastructure rather than snooping on customers.
Would having a 3rd party host the services in the EU meet your requirements? Or having data residency restrictions with strict key management, EU based support, and access transparency/approvals?
IMO Google is also taking this seriously, but I am genuinely curious if any off the above would meet your requirements.
Which one? I would like to support non-AWS-companies.
I was a stakeholder in an early cloud negotiation back in 2010-11, and one of the key issues was the support personnel. Ultimately, they have access to your data.
It’s hard to decipher the AWS Data Privacy policy:
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/
In section Who Owns Customer Content, it’s implied that AWS doesn’t access customers’ data:
“As a customer, you maintain ownership of your content, and you select which AWS services can process, store, and host your content. We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your agreement. We never use customer content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising.”
Here, the statement is we don’t access customer’s data without customer’s agreement. But customers do agree with ToS in which different statements might be included.
In another place it’s mentioned, if governments request, AWS will comply. Considering that governments obviously request access from cloud providers, and obviously require them not to disclose the backdoor, I came to the conclusion that governments have unconditional access to data held in data centers of companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
As for non-government access, there are claims that Amazon uses data or metadata to launch competing products. If I recall correctly, AWS may collect some data presumably to maintain and secure the platform and fight abuse. The counter argument is that, AWS will not risk a profitable business; but AWS is too big to be easily impacted and might act on good opportunities.
It would be great if people working in AWS or similar platforms could chime in.