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Unless something has changed, Walmart does not want its suppliers to use AWS to mitigate that very risk.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/wal-mart-is-reportedly-telli...

That’s my point, it’s irrational to think that. Amazon has so little to gain by doing that compared to the absolute mass of customers that would be migrated off of aws within a few years of such a scandal.

Counterpoint: at the same time, it's something you can do and not do at the same time - everything in AWS is virtualized (save for $$$$$ physical hosts almost nobody uses) and it's not like it's impossible to undetectably analyse/monitor running VMs in realtime.

So you can both do this (silently) and "not" do it (because it's impossible to detect), and it would thus be stupid to not actually do it because it's free data.

Zooming out I think this and the opposite view are equally possible. Just articulating what this perspective looks like.

That was because Amazon is a competitor to Walmart. It's not a risk that would apply to most companies. And it's probably not a very realistic risk, either. Walmart may have just been trying to hurt a competitor.

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