What Amazon knows about you
What Amazon knows about
you
Depending on how much you shop, watch and read with
Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth may know more about you than any other company
on earth.
The
big picture: Naturally, they
know what you've browsed or bought on their main service. They also know what
you've asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. They know even
more thanks to their ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads,
IMDB and Audible.
- Amazon.com: Everything
you have bought, plus the things you have just put in your cart, or
searched for, or added to a wish list, or just browsed on Amazon (and
Amazon-owned sites like Zappos and Diapers.com). And they know all of your
addresses and the names and addresses of anyone you've ever sent stuff to.
- Kindle (digital
books) and Audible (audio
books): All the books you've read, plus how far into the book you got.
Amazon also knows which books you have browsed or sampled, and what
passages you've highlighted in Kindle.
- Fire tablets: Amazon's
tablets run a custom version of Android, providing the company with lots
of data since it, not Google, powers the browsing and app store on the
devices. For search, users have a choice of Bing, Yahoo, Google or
DuckDuckGo.
- Prime Video (streaming
video): What you've watched, browsed and search for.
- Twitch (streaming game
videos): What you've watched, browsed and searched for.
- Ring (smart doorbells
and security gear): For customers with a paid recording plan, Amazon
stores videos for 30 to 120 days depending on location, or until a
customer manually deletes the video. Recordings for those who don't
subscribe to a plan are deleted automatically unless a customer posts a
video to the publicly available Neighbors app.
- Eero (wi-fi routers): One
of Amazon's most recent acquisitions, Eero sells a mesh wi-fi router
system. To do its job, like any home router, Eero's device knows every Web
site you go to, but the company says it doesn't collect or store this
information. (Eero detailed
its practices in a blog post after the Amazon acquisition.)
- IMDB (movie and TV
database): Although this is probably one of the lesser privacy concerns in
Amazon world, your taste in movies can say a lot about you.
- Goodreads (book-centric
social network): The focus may be on books, but Amazon is also building a
social graph of the service's bookworm members, in addition to getting
more details on what sort of topics members are interested in.
- Whole Foods (grocery
store): Now that Amazon owns the upscale supermarket, if you shop here
Amazon knows your grocery list, too. Whole Foods already offers deals to
Prime members, linking the purchases of its best online customers with
those buying offline.
Alexa
Amazon's virtual assistant is
worthy of its own section as its implications are so broad. Of course Alexa
knows all the things you ask it — but that's only the beginning.
- Amazon isn't recording everything you say,
but rather starts recording when it hears Alexa summoned via a specific
wake word (Alexa, Amazon, Computer or Echo). But there are instances where
Alexa gets activated inadvertently and collects audio you had no intention
of sending Amazon's way.
One
recent controversy arose over
just who at Amazon is listening to these audio snippets and for what purpose.
Bloomberg reported in
April that a team of Amazon workers and contractors across the globe listens to
consumers conversations with Alexa, stoking existing concerns about a device
that is always listening.
- Amazon told Axios that it only reviews
"an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of
customers in order to improve the customer experience," including
improvements to speech recognition, and that access to such data is
tightly controlled and limited to a small number of employees.
- A limited number of employees also have
access to location information in order to improve location-specific
features, such as "Where is the nearest coffee shop?" (Click here for
more on the Alexa-specific privacy policy.)
What else
Key
by Amazon: An optional delivery service
for Prime members that literally invites the Everything Store into your home, car or
garage to deliver goods ordered online. Amazon stresses that no one enters your
premises without explicit permission, that delivery personnel don't themselves
get access codes, and all of them undergo background checks.
Amazon
Go: The company's cashier-less
stores rely on deep surveillance of its aisles to allow customers to
buy products without a formal checkout process. To do that, Amazon uses an
array of cameras and sensors to determine who is taking what off the shelves.
Advertising: One of Amazon's fastest-growing businesses is
serving up ads, a testament to just how much it knows about you.
- Amazon says: "We create audience
segments and serve interest-based ads based on a variety of anonymized
shopping activities such as browse and purchase behaviors."
- Amazon says it sometimes includes third-party
audience information to increase the relevance of its ads.
- But Amazon gives customers the opportunity
to opt out by selecting “do not show me interest-based ads from Amazon” on
its advertising preferences page.
Amazon
Web Services: Amazon's
cloud-computing service leads the market, capturing 32%
of the global spend. But, as is the norm in the cloud industry, Amazon
doesn't access any of the data stored on its services by businesses, with
limited exceptions for court orders or security investigations.
What you can do
- Delete your browsing history. Amazon offers some options to limit its information-
gathering. For example, you can delete
your browsing history and turn off the collection of browsing
data.
- Mute Alexa and delete recordings. Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo devices have a physical
microphone-off button that can be pressed to ensure no recording takes
place. Amazon also offers an option to delete
the Alexa recordings it has made.
- Choose alternatives. No other
store offers quite as broad a selection as Amazon, but there are other
mega-stores, such as Target and Walmart, as well as other options for
digital media, smart home gear and physical retail outlets.
Go
deeper: Read the rest of the series.
- What
Google knows about you
- What
Facebook knows about you
- What
Tesla knows about you
- What
Internet people finders know about you
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