And it had been six months since Facebook was engulfed in scandal over Cambridge Analytica, a political intelligence firm that had managed to harvest private information from up to 87 million Facebook users for a seemingly Bond-villainesque psychographic scheme to help put Donald Trump in the White House. To prevent abuses like these, the European Union and the state of California had both passed sweeping new data privacy regulations. Now Congress, Thune said, was poised to write regulations of its own.

“The question is no longer whether we need a federal law to protect consumers' privacy,” he declared.

“The question is, what shape will that law take?” Sitting in front of the senator, ready to help answer that question, were representatives from two telecom firms, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Amazon. In the name of speedy customer service, unbridled growth, and rapid-fire “invention on behalf of customers”-in the name of delighting you-Amazon had given broad swathes of its global workforce extraordinary latitude to tap into customer data at will. It was, as former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon calls it, a “free-for-all” of internal access to customer information. And as information security leaders warned, that free-for-all left the company wide open to “internal threat actors” while simultaneously making it inordinately difficult to track where all of Amazon's data was flowing. To be clear: This story is not about Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing wing that manages data for millions of enterprises and government agencies, which has its own, separate information security apparatus. It's about the online retail platform used by hundreds of millions of ordinary consumers.

#360 TOTAL SECURITY REVIEW 2015 SOFTWARE#Īnd on that side of Amazon's business, InfoSec staffers warned of an unnerving “inability to detect security incidents.”īy the time DeVore started testifying about Amazon's long-standing commitment to privacy and security, the dangers that the security division had identified weren't just theoretical.

360 total security review 2015