Considering that OP created this account today and that they're admitting to what would be a felony and against Amazon's own privacy policy, I doubt this statement is true.
Even if the customer had a misconfigured S3 bucket that was exposed to the public, it would still constitute as accessing customer data you're not meant to see.
As other users have provided insight on, everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID, even if you had access to private information (which you wouldn't basically because it's locked behind several layers of security). Fireable and sueable offense which Amazon would definitely not allow, let alone endorse.
> everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID
That might be true in retail, but it wasn't anywhere close to true in AWS. When I left most engineers still had SSH access to the production hosts (and a not-insignificant portion of operations relied on that fact).
Definitely not defending parent here, but in this day in age many people create burner accounts specifically to avoid tying any statements back to them. It’s pretty acceptable practice to create burner accounts on HN. That said, I agree, I doubt any of these claims are true.
Even if the customer had a misconfigured S3 bucket that was exposed to the public, it would still constitute as accessing customer data you're not meant to see.
As other users have provided insight on, everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID, even if you had access to private information (which you wouldn't basically because it's locked behind several layers of security). Fireable and sueable offense which Amazon would definitely not allow, let alone endorse.