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What Amazon knows about you – more than you may have considered

Depending on how much you shop, watch and read with Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth may know more about you than any other company on earth, Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried reports. [Note – this is an extensive report – I have included just a portion]

  • Naturally, Amazon knows what you’ve browsed or bought on the site. And Amazon knows what you’ve asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. And Amazon may know even more thanks to its ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDb and Audible.

Here are some of the different types of information gathered by various Amazon services:

  • Amazon.com: Everything you’ve bought, plus the things you have just put in your cart, or searched for, or added to a wish list. And all of your addresses, and the names and addresses of anyone you’ve ever sent stuff to.
  • Kindle (digital books) and Audible (audio books): All the books you’ve read, plus how far into the book you got. Amazon also knows which books you have browsed or sampled, and what passages you’ve highlighted in Kindle.
  • Prime Video (streaming video): What you’ve watched, browsed and search for.
  • Twitch (streaming game videos): What you’ve watched, browsed and searched for.
  • Ring (smart doorbells and security gear): For customers with a paid recording plan, Amazon stores videos for 30 to 120 days depending on location, or until a customer manually deletes the video. Recordings for those who don’t subscribe to a plan are deleted automatically unless a customer posts a video to the publicly available Neighbors app.
  • Whole Foods (grocery store): If you shop here Amazon knows your grocery list….”

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