Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?
Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation.
I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this
Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough.
I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that.
However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.
Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.