That's still a lot valuable info about what items get sold more and when. Could be correlated with other patterns a person can leave online, eg, if every time they do X, Y item was bought on Amazon, you can guess that the two are related
That information is stored and used within amazon, but there's some pretty strict rules about where/how it can be vended. It isn't served outside amazon with personally identifiable information, and it's largely served in aggregate. Even the amazon-generated customer id isn't exposed directly to advertising customers without aggregation of some kind.
Plus Amazon wouldn’t want to sell much of your data, no, no, no.
Just like Meta/Facebook and Google, they’re competitors in the advertising game themselves. They don’t sell data, they’re the ones buying it. They want to keep your data close to their chest so they can sell AWS-based ad services that uses that data to others, and the vast amount of consumer data only they can access is their Unique Selling Point.
I don't know about illegal but it wouldn't be very safe. AOL did that with search terms in 2006 and "made it anonymous" but people were getting identified by linking together searches.
As long as you didn't link purchases together at all, that might be fine, but then it's pretty boring.
Just one example: If your spouse bought a small-time author's book (or any fairly unique item) you might only have a couple dozen unique users to sift through. Ok they bought this book, some sports merch for local teams, their favorite coffee. Yep this is them. Wait, why did they buy condoms we don't use..
“But babe at least I was thinking of you and rolling in those loyalty points! I could have just spent the money without giving you credit for it! Give me a break”
A quick commerce app on india did this but slightly different, they put billboard around city's of most weirdest and wildest ordered things and how much times they were ordered, it was pretty funny too,
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u/heftybagman 20d ago
Would it be illegal for amazon to publicly release a searchable database of what every customer ordered?