HACKER Q&A
📣 rootsudo

Is Amazon a better “data/privacy steward” than Google?


The trend as of late has been to "degoogle"-ify life, especially on HN and other tech places.

With that said, outside of self hosting, which, IMO is the "best" option - there are opportunities for other vendors. (Best meaning you know what you're doing, hopefully, but at the cost of possibly more money and time.)

Amazon runs and competes w/ Google offerings for across the board - do you think they're better?

They are "Ad-Tech" but my opinion has been that Amazon is "marginally" a better steward for cloud because they don't close shop/projects with little notice - they have many offerings across infrastructure.

They also do not have an open-ID esque SSO that ties your identity/life into one company - something that Google/Microsoft offer though the Microsoft one pales in comparison to Google.

I think it's also fair to compare against "Microsoft" here too, but IMO MSFT's image and privacy policies have vastly improved and are more transparent.

They are also in adtech, they have a search engine - bing but I hardly see Amazon discussed in this aspect.

Microsoft and Google IMO are much more 1:1 as they offer the same LOB - Google Suite/O365, email, etc but Amazon never comes up.


  👤 sp332 Accepted Answer ✓
Not notably better. From 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/CLQYZENMBI/amazon-data

And now they're being sued by a shareholder for knowingly violating state laws around customer data. https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-shareholder-amazon-astro...

Edit: actually the board is being sued on behalf of the company.


👤 barnabees
imo Google >>>> Microsoft > Amazon in terms of privacy

They all collect a lot of data, but Google offers very easy ways to manage that data and pause any data collection unlike Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft puts ads in your start menu. Amazon (at least AWS) monitors all their clients' data and copies the most successful ones.


👤 aborsy
AWS seems to better respect users’ privacy among those and other providers. They aren’t in ad business, and I haven’t seen them with data misuse.

👤 hulitu
No.