Amazon is creepy. It recommends all the product categories I’ve looked at but didn’t purchase. Tracking everything I clicked on and spent time looking
Discussion
They all do that, but Amazon and google have an advantage with smart speakers recording us
I don’t have any of those
Phone too
Pretty sure standard web tracking will suffice
When my gf got pregnant we had tons of suggestions in our respective feeds on the subject, instantly
To be fair, would you like it more if it recommended things you've never looked at and have zero interest in? It may be creepy, but that's kind of why you use it. It learns what you are most likely to want/need and feeds it to you. In fact, what you call creepy is an advantage in other contexts. For example, marrying a person. The advantages are actually very similar if you think about it. Now compare that to dating a different person every week. Amazon is your shopping spouse. lol
Id prefer it mind its own fking business 🤣
That is it's business though. I do wish they had non-binary privacy options (rather than all in on tracking or nothing).
But really, most of their tracking methods rely on you browsing their site while using a web browser with a logged in session. Check out Firefox Containers if you use Firefox. Super cool tool.
I suppose we could use prepaid cards and bogus profile data too. I created my account years ago but I probably should look into reducing some of the stuff discussed here. I rely way too much on Amazon these days.
This does remind me of some of the crap that I was turned off by when I was a web developer. Heat maps, pointer tracking, etc. You can learn a lot about a person from their keyboard and mouse usage.
Yeah it tracks everything - mouse movements; how long you pause over what, clicks; related searches and millions of other data points to create profiles and then compares you to other profiles and predicts what you might want to look for
If it makes you feel better, blocking JS scripts hinders a lot of the creepy tools websites use. Some websites just break though. Or browse in a separate container/browser that doesn't have login data stored and then copy and paste the item link into the credentialed browser or container when you want to checkout. I wonder if they have a guest checkout option.
Protip: browse while logged off using a VPN. Only log in when you actually want to purchase.
This 👆🏻
Another tip: switch the country of your VPN a few times to different regions (and don’t log in) when you are getting flights or looking for rentals, hotels, etc. the price literally changes sometimes depending on where it thinks you are purchasing from.
Yes.
Hoping to delete my account. But the old lady won't delete hers so it would still be like I'm using Amazon.
Hard to escape these tech giants.
Their algorithm is creepy in that sense. I've found that leaving items in your cart for long periods of time can get you a pretty big discount if you wait long enough. However, their algorithm might have realized I'm tight AF so this hasn't happened for a while.
Better than having them display items you just purchased yesterday. But yes those big techs are creepy.