To me, this calls into question to what degree Amazon will willfully comply with government requests that come in via phone call and not a warrant.
From the Amazon shopping side, you can build quite a profile on someone based on their past order history. Want to find protesters? There’s been a number of folks who don’t usually order office supplies suddenly ordering the thick Sharpie markers in a certain area...
Hopefully AWS steers clear of this, I suppose. That’d have even worse implications.
This is a very good point. This puts AWS in a bad light. We should assume Amazon will, for example, mobilize the whole company to find a needle in a haystack on AWS if the president or his staff calls.
Ironically there are protections for this, and much of what we call "Hacker Culture" is built around the ideas; but they only apply to librarians and libraries in the US; https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill
> to what degree Amazon will willfully comply with government requests that come in via phone call and not a warrant
This has been rumbling on for years, regardless of administration, because the security services love overreach. This is the basis of the whole "EU safe harbor" dispute, because Microsoft can't guarantee to EU customers of their Ireland datacenter that they will follow GDPR and not leak customer secrets to US security services.
From the Amazon shopping side, you can build quite a profile on someone based on their past order history. Want to find protesters? There’s been a number of folks who don’t usually order office supplies suddenly ordering the thick Sharpie markers in a certain area...
Hopefully AWS steers clear of this, I suppose. That’d have even worse implications.