From the article:

> Given Amazon’s obsession with speed and eliminating friction to foster faster consumerism, the dawdling data solicitation process seems like it just might be intentional, designed to dissuade requests.

> It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5 days to process a data request, as per the company’s California Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020. There was no option for expedited Amazon Prime data delivery and no button equivalent to an instantaneous Buy Now (née 1-Click) option when selecting my data.

When you use Amazon services, I don't think there is a single, global database of all your data. Amazon has many different offerings (prime video, alexa, music, photos, books) often with many individual organizations and sets of teams within those organizations. Each customer-facing feature is supported by some N number of services, which collect and store data in different systems. These can be modern day systems built from the ground up with "privacy data reporting" as a first class feature, or they could legacy systems that were built any time before GDPR and other compliance laws came online.

Some of these systems are write optimized as opposed to being read optimized. Others aren't even backed by a relational or NoSQL database. Instead, they may contain your data in some format that you cannot quickly query in constant time.

It makes little sense for Amazon or any other company to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to stand up entire organizations to migrate off these systems – simply because a median 1.5 day turnaround time is too high or so that Nikita Mazurov doesn't have to wait 19 days. Presumably that 19 days is closer to their 80th percentile or 90th percentile turn around time. Under the GDPR legislation, a Google search shows that the maximum turn around time under the law is about ~1 month.

Any single system that has to integrate with practically EVERYTHING else in your entire company is going to be complex, no matter how much you try to simplify it. Your data may be stored in some format that's meaningful if it's given to you as is.

Or that data may be stored containing proprietary information. Or it could contain implementation details. For instance, I've built systems where we stored "magic numbers" in place of string into a database, mainly to save on storage costs. I probably wouldn't want to return those magic numbers to a customer, because it would be meaningless.

What I'm getting at is to even return one record from one specific service isn't necessarily just a SELECT query (assuming the data is stored in a relational db to being with).

This article is full of outright negativity, trying to fuel outrage and assuming everything on Amazon's side is malice, incompetence, or some combination of both. I couldn't but help and look up the author's page on The Intercept:

> Nikita Mazurov is a security researcher focusing on privacy issues revolving around source protection, counter-forensics, and privacy assurance.

I don't use such strong language on HN, but here's my own thesis: This is an egregiously padded resume. Best case, it describes a university student/researcher who has never actually solved any real world problem. It's a combination of that fact and the fact that this article was deliberately written in a way to generate clicks by manufacturing outrage.