[kaesar14]

But then what about other commenters saying that this is exactly what their sectors of the company do? Do you think it's impossible that a massive company like Amazon that controls an ungodly amount of the Internet would break those rules? Especially when the government of their home country hasn't pursued an antitrust case in God knows how long

[notatoad]

>But then what about other commenters saying that this is exactly what their sectors of the company do?

i don't see anybody claiming that amazon is harvesting data from inside their customer's infrastructure. amazon has a lot of data that's "amazon's data" that would tell them about businesses that are operating on AWS that might be ripe for competition.

For example, they know what your AWS bill is, and how it's been trending. If you pay a huge bandwidth bill and it goes up 50% each month, they know you've got a business model that's working and that they can undercut you on one of your big expenses.

[kaesar14]

You're right that other commenters aren't necessarily saying that they're peering into buckets and PII...but I err on the side of questioning that the company is committing wrongdoing.

[losteric]

Amazon does not trawl customer data.

However, metrics like AMI popularity is Amazon's data... and that definitely informs first-class AWS product development. Once the company identifies a business opportunity, different teams often investigate "build" and "buy" options simultaneously.

Same goes for retail - Amazon works backwards from high-margin categories to identify opportunities, then pursues investment in existing brands versus spinning up products under the company brands.

This all feels very monopolistic to me, but regardless it's worlds apart from the accusation of stealing private information through faux investment offerings.

[jacquesm]

I don't think the difference is all that large. Legally, yes. But ethically they are pretty close. After all, any product launched like that will be at the expense of those already operating in that niche including Amazon's platform users.

[whoisjuan]

Yeah I don’t know. It’s possible that there’s some evil stuff happening. I’m just relating my experience as a pawn employee. They parrot this incessantly.