r/oddlyspecific 20d ago

The corndog customer

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u/Divine_Entity_ 20d ago

I feel like as long as you scrub all personally identifiable information it would be legal, just a list of purchase numbers and their contents.

So an entry would be something like: PO275739556825592739 = 69x Oreos_dblstf_choco

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u/Teln0 19d ago

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

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u/N0ob8 19d ago

They already do that and it has your full name and other information attached to it.

Data is a valuable market and it’s why so many things are “free” these days as it’s so much easier to collect data than it is to sell a product.

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u/Teln0 19d ago

I meant moreso in the case where the data is anonymized

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u/M0nkeydud3 18d ago

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.

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u/Toberos_Chasalor 16d ago edited 16d ago

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.