All the ways Amazon tracks you – and how to stop it

It also uses information such as your location to ensure that your purchases are actually delivered to you. “We process your personal information to operate, provide and improve the Amazon services we provide to our customers,” the company’s privacy statement said. It also expounds the legal arguments for all the data it collects.

Let us look at the information you provide to Amazon. You should assume that everything you do on the Amazon website, app, 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 to Alexa will be tracked and stored.

Amazon’s privacy policy says that depending on your settings, you may provide it with your name, address, phone number, age, location, bank details, credit history information, playlists, watch lists, wish lists, recordings, Wi -Fi credentials, and any photos you upload to your profile, as well as the names, emails, and addresses of people in your contacts. If you sell goods on Amazon, it can get your VAT and other business information.

The automated information collected by Amazon makes things even more creepy. This is all the data about how and when you use Amazon products. Freelance journalist Riccardo Coluccini received a form with 12,048 rows detailing all the clicks he made on Amazon.com. “These values ​​relate to the date and time of access to a particular page, the IP address and device used, geographic location (if possible) based on the IP address, and the name of the telecommunications company that provides Internet services,” he said. Written in 2018Similarly, other data requests to Amazon show how Kindle log Date, reading time, and how often you copy or highlight parts of the book. Similarly, Ring the doorbell log Records of every movement they detected and every tap performed in the Ring app.

Amazon’s privacy notice details, it may automatically collect your IP address, login details, computer location, errors recorded by your device when using its services, your application preferences, cookie details, link to your mobile phone Or the identifier of the computer, and all your clicks, including page interaction information “such as scrolling, clicking, and mouse hovering.” It’s not uncommon for companies to collect and record all your interactions with their products—they can be used to improve the product and identify errors—but this information quickly accumulates. Amazon said the data it collects can be used to improve its services and comply with legal obligations and other purposes. “We will not sell customers’ personal information to others,” its privacy statement said.

The last type of information Amazon collects about you is information from third parties.If the delivery company finds a problem with the address you provided, this may include an updated delivery address; account and purchase information from “merchants operating co-branded business with us”; information about “interaction” with Amazon subsidiaries (with Many of them And they have their own privacy policies); information about the devices you have associated with Alexa; and credit history as part of their fraud detection efforts.

How to stop tracking

It is impossible to completely prevent Amazon from tracking you-if you plan to shop on Amazon, then Amazon will collect your data-but there are steps you can take to limit the information it can collect and use. Some of them are provided by Amazon itself, while others involve adjusting browser settings and using other tools.

First, if you are interested in the data Amazon stores about you, you can use its download tool to Visit some of them. This will only give you a subset of what Amazon owns, you have to make one Subject access request Get everything.