It does seem likely that Google will pay to store every bit of encrypted customer data that is currently stored forever because potentially decades from now it could be cracked and they could access all that amazing ancient private information.
Google is a huge company, the idea that it would set out to do something that everyone involved in would know is directly breaking the law (rather than doing something thats a grey area, or they know is legal but 'unethical' or could become a PR issue, or destroy trust in them and destroy their product) is fairly unbelievable.
This comes up again and again with stories about Google and (particularly) AWS cloud computing. I hope for better on HN!
There’s also mainstream reporting that Amazon employees used retail sales data to launch competing products: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
Maybe the first story is fake and the second is real… but they both point to a “win at all costs” company culture where policies might be violated, even if it threatens trust in the platform and a PR problem when exposed.
Hacking computers, networks, or services of your competitors, even when running in you data center is just bad business.
You're reading that a lot differently than I am.
The quoted post says:
>AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products
None of that reads, to me, as them having had to use confidential data to do any of these things.
You can identify many organisations that are running on AWS without knowing anything about AWS accounts - blog posts, IP space, public code, social media comments from staff, linkedin and all sorts of other places will often reveal that.
Scraping/finding customer lists can be done using research, too. I've spoken to Account Manager-types at places and they've often used various tools that scrape other public resources to identify customers of competing services.
Swap out company names, and it's effectively what I've seen from a bunch of companies, without it delving into anything unethical.
Data is still data.
> Google is a huge company, the idea that it would set out to do something that everyone involved in would know is directly breaking the law (rather than doing something thats a grey area, or they know is legal but 'unethical' or could become a PR issue, or destroy trust in them and destroy their product) is fairly unbelievable.
They do this in Europe by not complying with GDPR. ( and they are not the only one)
> This comes up again and again with stories about Google and (particularly) AWS cloud computing. I hope for better on HN!
The point is that there are layers of security, and by moving the data outside of their physical control apple has given up one of those layers of security.
It might matter, yes. A company run by a guy like Eric Schmidt is a lot more likely to play nice with the US government when it comes to privacy compared to a company run by a guy like Cook, who from the outside seems obsessed with user-privacy (as long as China isn't directly involved).
Google employs the same standard issue tech person you see here on HN.