JEFF BEZOS HAS a hidden weapon: your data. While Amazon’s retail empire is built on a complex web of infrastructure and murky working practices, its selling success is based on an intricate knowledge of what millions of people buy and browse every day.
Amazon has been obsessed with your data since it was an online bookshop. Almost two decades ago the firm’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, said that the company tries to “collect as much information as possible” so it can provide people with recommendations. And, as Amazon has expanded, so has its data collection operation. “They happen to sell products, but they are a data company,” a former Amazon executive told the BBC in 2020.
Amazon knows a lot about you. That includes everything you do in Amazon’s ecosystem: from the thousands of searches you make on its app or website to your every individual click, scroll, and mouse movement. It’s a lot of data—and that’s just the beginning of it. People who have requested their data from Amazon have been sent hundreds of files, including a decade of their shopping history and thousands of voice clips recorded by Alexa devices.
“The reason online shopping through Amazon is so convenient is because the company has spent years consolidating its power and reach,” says Sara Nelson, director of the Corporate Data Exploitation program at the civil liberties group Privacy International. “The company is in a position to collect huge amounts of data—through its shopping platform, but also through its Ring cameras, Alexa voice assistants, web services, delivery services, streaming services, and its many other business streams.” And now Amazon is moving into health care—something that Nelson says is concerning.
Amazon’s data collection is also reportedly putting it on the wrong side of regulators. On June 10, The Wall Street Journal reported that data protection regulators in Luxembourg, where Amazon’s European headquarters is based, are preparing a $425 million GDPR fine in response to the way it uses people’s personal data—although no specific details were provided and an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the potential fine. Anti-competition regulators are also looking at the company’s use of data. And governments are demanding more data from Amazon, including information from Ring and Alexa recordings.
What Amazon Knows About You
Let’s start with Amazon’s privacy notice. At more than 4,400 words it’s hardly surprising that most people don't read it, but it does clearly lay out what Amazon does with your data. Broadly, the information that Amazon collects about you comes from three sources. These are: the data you give it when you use Amazon (and its other services, such as reading Kindle books), the data it can collect automatically (information about your phone and your location), and, finally, information it gets from third parties (credit checks to find out if your account is fraudulent, for example).
The ultimate goal of all this data collection? To help sell you more things. Amazon will use your personal information—and everything it can learn about your likes and dislikes—to show you recommendations for stuff it thinks you might buy. More broadly, it can also get a sense of its most popular sellers and people’s shopping behavior.
“Personal data about shopping is incredibly sensitive,” says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics. “It can tell you about a person’s health status, their political tendencies, their sexual practices, and much more. People buy all kinds of things on Amazon, from books and movies to health-related items. Add to that personal data from Alexa, and it gets even more concerning.”
It also uses information, such as your location, to make sure the things you buy actually get delivered to you. “We process your personal information to operate, provide, and improve the Amazon Services that we offer our customers,” the company’s privacy notice says. It also broadly sets out the legal arguments for all the data it collects.
Let’s look at the information you give to Amazon. You should assume that everything you do on Amazon’s website, apps, or any of its products is saved in some way. Every order you place on Amazon, every show you watch on Prime, every song you listen to on Amazon Music, and every request you make of Alexa is tracked and stored.
Amazon’s privacy policy says that, depending on your settings, you might give it your name, address, phone number, age, location, bank details, credit history information, playlists, watch lists, wish lists, voice recordings, Wi-Fi credentials, and any photographs you’ve uploaded to your profile, as well as the names, emails, and addresses of people in your contacts. And if you sell items on Amazon, it can get your VAT and other business information.
The automatic information Amazon collects is where things get a bit more creepy. This is all data about how and when you use Amazon products. Freelance journalist Riccardo Coluccini was sent a table with 12,048 rows detailing all the clicks he made on Amazon’s website. “The values concern the day and time when a specific page is visited, the IP address and the device used, the geolocation—if possible—based on the IP address, and the name of the telecommunication company that offers the internet service,” he wrote in 2018. Similarly, other data requests to Amazon show how Kindle logs the date, time spent reading, and how often you copy or highlight parts of books. Likewise, Ring doorbells log every record of motion they detect and each tap made within the Ring app.
Amazon’s privacy notice details that it may automatically collect your IP address, login details, the location of computer, errors your device logs when using its services, your app preferences, cookie details, identifiers linked to your phone or computer, and all the URLs that you click, including page interaction information “such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs.” It’s not uncommon for companies to collect and record all of your interactions with their products—they can be used to improve the products and identify bugs—but this information quickly adds up. Amazon says the data it collects can be used to improve its services as well as complying with legal obligations and other purposes. “We are not in the business of selling our customers' personal information to others,” its privacy notice says.
The final type of information Amazon collects about you is that from third parties. This can include updated delivery addresses if a delivery company finds there’s a problem with the one you provided; account and purchase information from “merchants with which we operate co-branded businesses”; information about “interactions” with Amazon’s subsidiaries (there’s a lot of them and they have their own privacy policies); information about devices you’ve linked with Alexa; and credit history it gets as part of its efforts to detect fraud.
How to Stop the Tracking
It’s impossible to stop Amazon tracking you completely—if you’re going to shop with Amazon, then Amazon will collect your data—but there are a few steps you can take to limit the information that it can gather and use. Some of these are provided by Amazon itself, while others involve tweaking your browser settings and using other tools.
First, if you’re interested in the data Amazon has stored about you, you can use its download tools to access some of it. This will only provide you with a subset of what Amazon has, and you’ll have to make a subject access request to get everything.
Beyond this, there are some controls that Amazon has that can improve your privacy. Alexa and Ring, for instance, have their own privacy hubs where you can delete recordings and manage privacy settings. But for the majority of Amazon information, you’ll need your main account. You can turn off Amazon showing you personalized ads based on what it infers about your interests and likes—although you will still see recommendations based on your previous purchases on Amazon. (They can be tweaked, but not turned off, here.) You should also consider turning off advertising cookies, which allow third parties to collect your information. Amazon’s list of third-party cookie partners includes more than 75 companies, ranging from Facebook to mobile gaming giant King.
You can also turn off your browsing history on Amazon—though the impact of this is debatable. “Amazon can keep your browsing history hidden,” reads one Amazon settings page. “When you turn your browsing history off, we will not show items you click on, or searches that you make from this device.” That doesn’t mean the data is deleted. Véliz says it can be incredibly difficult to get Amazon to delete personal data. “You’ll see that there is no way to delete your purchasing history—none of it, not even the things you bought a decade ago,” she says. “The best thing you can do is hide your purchasing history from yourself, which is ridiculous, and even that doesn’t work well sometimes.” (Archiving orders can be done from your orders page, which includes a drop-down menu for each year you’ve had an Amazon account).
Beyond Amazon’s own tools, if you want to limit how much Amazon can track you then you’ll need to use a privacy browser. These can automatically disable third-party cookies and stop you from being tracked across the web. If you don’t want searches to be linked to your Amazon account, then you need to ensure you are logged out as well. There’s also the option of researching—and buying—products directly from manufacturers or other online sellers. And, if you really don’t want to be tracked by Amazon at all, there’s the nuclear option: Delete your Amazon account.
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