Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over their data
Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over
their data
Jeffrey Dastin JULY 16, 2019 / 5:02 AM
(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc has a promotion for U.S.
shoppers on Prime Day, the 48-hour marketing blitz that started Monday: Earn
$10 of credit if you let Amazon track the websites you visit.
The deal is for new installations of the Amazon
Assistant, a comparison-shopping tool that customers can add to their web
browsers. It fetches Amazon’s price for products that users see on Walmart.com,
Target.com and elsewhere.
In order to work, the assistant needs access to users’ web
activity, including the links and some page content they view. The catch, as
Amazon explains in the fine print, is the company can use this data to improve
its general marketing, products and services, unrelated to the shopping
assistant.
The terms underscore the power consumers routinely give
to Amazon and other big technology companies when using their free services. In
this case, Amazon gains potential insight into how it should tailor marketing
and how it could stamp out the retail competition.
“This data is often used for training machine learning
models to do better ad targeting,” said Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the
nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But in the U.S., there aren’t really
restrictions on what you can do with this kind of data.”
Amazon already has more than 7 million customers using
its assistant via Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, according to data
published by those web browsers. Other companies offer similar shopping tools.
While another technology known as tracking pixels shows
Amazon information from visitors to roughly 15 percent of the top 10,000
websites, the assistant lets Amazon follow a smaller set of users from page to
page, Cyphers said.
Amazon’s combination of tools still pales in comparison
to data collection by Alphabet Inc’s Google, which has tracking pixels on most
web pages.
Amazon did not discuss how it uses the data it gathers
via the assistant for any unrelated purposes, but a job listing for an
affiliated team known as Browser Integration Technologies says the group’s
influence “spans across advertising and marketing, pricing and selection.”
“Customer trust is paramount to Amazon, and we take
customer privacy very seriously,” a company spokeswoman said, noting compliance
with the assistant’s privacy policy, which says data collection is for websites
that users visit “where we may have relevant product or service
recommendations.”
The policy also notes that customers can disable certain
features of the assistant, and that Amazon only links browsing data to an
individual’s account when the assistant is in active use.
U.S. lawmakers have recently increased their scrutiny of
Silicon Valley’s data collection practices. A bill introduced in the Senate
last month proposed requiring that big platforms disclose what information they
gather from users and how much that is worth.
“When a big tech company says its product is free,
consumers are the ones being sold. These ‘free’ products track everything we
do,” said Republican Senator Josh Hawley in a statement announcing the bill.
Amazon’s Prime Day promotion offers a window into what it
will pay for browsing data. For Prime Day 2018, it offered $5 off to new Amazon
Assistant users who spent at least $25. This year it offered $10 off to those
spending at least $50.
Amazon is also fine paying nothing for the data: New
customers only get the $10 credit if they install the assistant from a
particular landing page, if they are Prime members, and if they make their
purchase via the assistant by Aug. 2.
Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by
Greg Mitchell and Leslie Adler
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