10+ year Amazon veteran.
AWS has very strict rules around accessing any kind of customer data. All of Amazon has some pretty significant red tape and hurdles to get security clearance to launch any piece of working software. No, that won’t stop a shitty product manager from looking over sales data to figure out if a certain business is worth exploiting, but accessing AWS customer data is an entirely different ball game. It’s like: jumping over a fence vs trying to break into Area 51.
I can almost guarantee that this egregious level of snooping on AWS customer data would never happen, and if somehow it did happen, it’s a nefarious individual with SIGNIFICANT authority to influence entire teams to extract, analyze, and get insights from this data. Again, I don’t think anyone at Amazons leadership is that insane to put their entire professional career in jeopardy, for something that someone would have a 100% guaranteed leak.
The people working there aren’t exactly idiots who’d easily fall in line and do something like this.
I’d like to be clear - I’m not defending Amazon. I no longer work there, and for what it’s worth, I think it’s a miserable place to work. A culture of back stabbing, inventing abstractions to drive promotions, people literally crying, disconnected leaders focused more on empire building to get promotions instead of doing what’s actually right for customers. Even then, the notion that AWS could line up teams, even on a secret project to do something so disdainful is an extreme stretch.