[23david]

It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities.

So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.

[hbosch]

I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.

[phil21]

I didn't even think this was debateable any longer. It absolutely happens on their retail side.

I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand.

You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence.

Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.

[FmrAMZN_TA]

You are correct. They ABSOLUTELY monitor customer spend usage, without using one iota of personally identifiable information.

[CaptSpify]

Just like it would be careless if the telecoms started sending your web traffic to governments. Or how careless it would be if Google started snooping into your email. Or how careless it would be if phone companies let someone else listen in on your calls and texts.

It's a good thing those never happened either.

[devmunchies]

Is this for real? Thats terrible.

[throwawaymanbot]

It is undeniably terrible, But welcome to fortune 500 business practices. In this world you are seen as weak if you DONT do these things.