Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle e-reader will collect data such as what you read, when, how fast you read, what you’ve highlighted and book genres. You also have the option to turn the feature off in the Amazon Photos app or on the website. But it makes no such commitment about other types of photo data, such as geolocation tags, device information or attributes of people and objects featured in images.”Īmazon Photos does not sell customer information and data to third parties or use content for ad targeting, an Amazon spokesperson says, insisting the feature is for ease of use. “Amazon promises not to share facial recognition data with third parties. If you use Amazon to store your photos, a facial recognition feature is enabled by default, she says. “From this information, Amazon can work out where you work, where you live, how you spend your leisure time and who your family and friends are,” says Rowenna Fielding, director of data protection consultancy Miss IG Geek.Īt the same time, Prime Video and Fire TV information about what you watch and listen to can reveal your politics, religion, culture and economic status, says Fielding. For example, if you just use its online retail site via the app or website, Amazon will collect data such as purchase dates and payment and delivery information. Some of the data is used for “personalisation” – big tech speak for using your data to improve your online experience – but it can reveal a lot about you. How often you look up words on the Kindle e-reader might indicate how literate you are in a certain language Meanwhile, when you use its website, cookie trackers are used to “enhance your shopping experience” and improve its services, Amazon says. It knows your orders, content you watch on Prime, your contacts if you upload them and communications with it via email. This covers three areas: information you give Amazon, data it collects automatically and information from other sources such as delivery data from carriers.Īmazon can collect your name, address, searches and recordings when you speak to the Alexa voice assistant. But, according to Amazon’s privacy policy, the tech giant still collects a large amount of information. Strict EU regulation in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK equivalent the Data Protection Act limit the ways personal data can be used in Europe compared with the US. So, what data does Amazon collect and share and what can you do to stop it? The data Amazon collects, according to its privacy policy And a recent Wired investigation showed concerning privacy and security failings at the tech giant. Last year, Amazon was hit with a $886.6m (£636m) fine for processing personal data in violation of EU data protection rules, which it is appealing against. Like its data-grabbing counterparts Google and Facebook, Amazon’s practices have come under the scrutiny of regulators. Those who have requested their data from Amazon are astonished by the vast amounts of information they are sent, including audio files from each time they speak to the company’s voice assistant, Alexa. Not everyone is happy about this level of surveillance. The firm’s software is so accomplished at prediction that third parties can hire its algorithms as a service called Amazon Forecast. The more Amazon and services you use – whether it’s the shopping app, the Kindle e-reader, the Ring doorbell, Echo smart speaker or the Prime streaming service – the more their algorithms can infer what kind of person you are and what you are most likely to buy next. The 200 million users who are Amazon Prime members are not only the corporation’s most valuable customers but also their richest source of user data. Continuous analysis of customer data determines, among other things, prices, suggested purchases and what profitable own-label products Amazon chooses to produce. F rom selling books out of Jeff Bezos’s garage to a global conglomerate with a yearly revenue topping $400bn (£290bn), much of the monstrous growth of Amazon has been fuelled by its customers’ data.
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