Inside Amazon’s Plan To Know (Almost) Everything About You

Big Tech corporations know that the best marketing strategy involves knowing what potential customers need even before they begin searching for it. That’s why you’ve probably seen targeted ads on social media for products that seem eerily specific to whatever might be going on in your life at the moment.

Of course, this is no accident. It’s all part of intricate algorithms that track your movements across the internet — and Amazon is arguably the best at capitalizing on this information.

Digging into the database

Self-described “Amazon super-user” Leo Kelion recently described his journey into understanding how the company seems to know so much about him. It started with a data subject access request that delivered all of the info that the company has gathered through Amazon products such as Echo speakers, Ring cameras, a Kindle e-reader, and a Fire TV device.

The sheer amount of data is staggering and included:

• More than 31,000 interactions with Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant
• Nearly 2,700 Amazon product searches since 2017
• A whopping 83,657 interactions with Kindle over a five-year period

That last collection of data, Kelion wrote, “actually triggers a warning message saying it is too big for my software to handle.”

More than 25 years in the making

Amazon’s ability to collect and use this type of data to its own benefit didn’t happen overnight. There’s a new BBC documentary in the works that traces this program back at least to 1997 when founder Jeff Bezos conducted a brainstorming session in the mountains near Seattle.

James Marcus teamed up with Bezos during the retreat and recalled that a “mania for quantification was in Jeff’s heart.”

Although Amazon’s algorithm was in its infancy at the time, Marcus said that Bezos “understood that data was in fact very valuable.”

Chris Agee June 23rd, 2023

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