All the Ways Amazon Tracks You—and How to Stop It
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.
