Amazon’s relentless personal data foot-dragging

A system’s purpose is what it does.

Sometimes, the best way to understand a failure is to contrast it with a success. Take Amazon, whose avowed “relentlessness” created next-day Prime delivery and AWS, with its power to instantaneously, continuously emit “buckets” of data.

Amazon boasts endlessly about its efficiency, ease of use and speed — which means that whenever you find Amazon being inefficient, hard to use and slow, it’s reasonable to assume that this is a deliberate choice. Like, say, when Amazon is giving you the data it has collected on you.

Nikita Mazurov is a security and privacy researcher with The Intercept. Noting that Amazon is now legally required (under California’s CCPA) to show him all the data it has gathered on him, he placed a request for that data. Therein begins the tale.

https://theintercept.com/2022/03/27/amazon-personal-data-request-dark-pattern/

Amazon — home of one-day delivery of physical goods — took 19 days to deliver that data. During those 19 days, it required Mazurov to jump through innumerable hoops, and, on six separate occasions, tried to divert him to his “Your Account” page where “you can access a lot of your data instantly.”

The data, when delivered, came as 74 separate .zip files, with no “download all” button. Once Mazurov manually downloaded those files — clicking 74 links in succession and piecing the data together — it became apparent that the thin, sanitized stream of data on his “Your Account” page was a translucent scrim over a massive block of data Amazon had squirreled away on him.

It’s…a lot: search keywords, chat logs, conversations with buyers and sellers, your IP addresses, how many search results you click on/add to your basket/buy, and mystery data like “Shopping Refinement” whose values are things like “26,444,740,832,600,000.”

Amazon retains data you’ve explicitly deleted (like old shipping addresses), which exposes you to risk by providing answers to other services’ verification questions (“What was your first street address?”).

There are also files on everything you watched on Prime Video, everything you read on a Kindle, everything you listened to on Amazon…