alt Hacker NewsIt's really quite the opposite.
Large firms have a much harder time hiding that kind of behavior, and they have much more to lose.
Large firms require processes and controls around everything. If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know, it's part of engineering designs, and a whistleblower is going to leak it to the press.
And then Amazon is going to lose all of its business customers once its privacy guarantees were shown to be intentionally circumvented.
It is simply not economically rational for a company like Amazon or OpenAI to look at the data of its corporate customers.
Regular consumers are a different story, because you need to respond to abuse, illegal activity, etc. So they don't have the same privacy guarantees.
But corporate customers, that stuff is watertight. No cloud provider is going to risk losing their entire business because they violated their privacy guarantees.
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> If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know
According to this comment, they did have a mechanism and a process for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929959
Yet it seems to have had negligible impact on their ability to obtain and retain customers.
That's exactly how amazon decides what becomes an amazon basics product.
AWS has also strip mined open-source software, elasticsearch, redis, mongo, browser rendering tools, etc.
> If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know, it's part of engineering designs, and a whistleblower is going to leak it to the press
An awful lot of this sort of thing in the corporate world is based on pinky-promises and legal threats, more than on robust technical controls.
Every production system I have ever seen has at least one set of dev-accessible keys that has access to the production DB. Mature systems at least had audit logging around who retrieved those keys, less mature systems often didn't have any kind of internal access logs.
Is "Amazon the corporate entity" snooping on your data? Absolutely not. Is someone with Amazon internal access snooping on your data? You'll never know either way.