To what extent are they able to leverage that?
I had a similar experience with AWS when I worked at Netflix. We were trying to diagnose a really strange problem and I asked the engineer to look at our data from their tools to help me find it. They told me they couldn't access that data, that the tools blocked them. Then I tried to give them an SSH key for one of our instances and they told me they would get fired for doing that and could not under any circumstance log into our box.
I assume MS has similar controls.
Sheryl Sandberg was using her power to silence reporting on her partner’s sexual harrasment charges. Ebay execs were terrorizing a random couple. But no, they would never look into customer data! Pinky promise!
Such a naïve way of thinking…
Exactly. There will be strict controls for nearly all employees, but the rules don't really apply to top executives. Anyone in IT or Infosec who has to try to enforce policies on top execs has encountered this in their career.
If there is a substantial business advantage in seeing some data the company has, you can bet the execs are seeing that data.
A lot of AWS itself is just copied open source projects [2].
Google does the same thing with Yelp [3].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-eu...
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.
I know for instance they do something similar in terms of ripping off successful products on Amazon.com as Amazon Basics.
It's a pattern of behavior from Amazon, and given their backstabbing, cut throat culture (that you mentioned) isn't it fair to say that it's possible for Amazon employees looking to get ahead at all costs would violate those strict rules?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
I’m sure there are some people that do. But AWS also knows what is it’s customers need and would be far more likely to go after those markets. Than go after a second level derivative like bandwidth.
I personally couldn’t imagine that it would go over to well if someone wrote a proposal in the form of a PRFAQ saying we should go after $x market because we noticed that a customer’s bandwidth was high.
What government regulations actually prevent this?
But what about who is a customer? When I set up some stuff on AWS with a corporate email account, we got emails and phone calls right away from a very interested (and not very useful) sales person; I suspect because the corporate domain was high profile. Email domain is customer data, but it seems they looked at that. (OTOH, maybe all signups get a high touch sales process)
Or how about just a top N list of customers by spend (or bandwidth) or top N medium-big customers by growth? That's customer data, and would be super useful for (anti-)competitive reasons, but kind of hard to say no, you can't know who the big customers are.