Would you like a rude, and perhaps slightly humorous, reminder of how much data surveillance Amazon conducts on its customers? Have we got the thing for you!
On Tuesday, one customer shared how she accidentally stumbled on an obscure section on the Amazon website that most of us overlook. It contained, to her horror, a “page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless.”
In a screenshot she provided, she highlighted one standout. Amazon, with brutal objectivity, asserted that she “has flat buttocks.”
“I mean it ain’t wrong but damn did you have to call me out like that?” the customer wrote in the Threads post.
The post quickly went viral, racking up well over a million views. Soon, others were sharing the strange dossiers that the e-commerce giant was keeping on them — some of it invasive, some of it funny, and some of it bizarre.
A few examples were also downright insulting.
The Amazon page said that one woman “has no friends” — in addition to describing her as a “fifty-year-old man.” Another customer’s page said she hasn’t “worn a medium size in anything in years.” And another said the customer “has a stomach that hangs over their vagina.”
Some got creepy. “Uses phone in the shower to read Kindle books,” Amazon said of one customer, who confirmed that the habit was true. “I mean yes but wtf,” she wrote.
Injecting some levity back in this topic, there were also plenty of inane and silly inferences.
One customer was baffled that the Amazon dossier asserted that they liked “brunettes with muscles.” It also claimed someone kept a “seasonal rotation of decorative goose outfits,” and that someone else “cannot keep real plants alive.”
Sometimes, the dossiers tell a story. “Likely prefers Ben & Jerry’s for premium ice cream,” one asserted, before expanding in the next section: “Explore premium ice cream flavors in a concentrated period.”
If you’re curious what kind of haphazard observations Amazon is keeping on you, you can pull up the page by clicking on the “Account” link under the Account & Lists drop down menu. Scroll to the bottom of the page you land on and click a small link that says “manage your information” and there you have it. On mobile, you click on the profile account icon on the bottom bar, hit “Account,” then “Shopping preferences,” and then “About you.”
In all likelihood, Amazon could have more dirt on you than it’s letting on. And it certainly isn’t the only company keeping this much data on its customers, though the post is a recent humorous example of how more people are coming face to face with these practices. It recently came to light via a Wired investigation, for example, that McDonalds was keeping hundreds of pages worth of intel on its customers and using the data to predict stuff like how often the customer is expected to stop by.
More on privacy: Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family
