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Does Amazon Track and Save Our Data?
Amazon isn’t a social media site, it’s an online shopping website, but does Amazon track and save our data like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and others? Amazon saves everything and sells it just like every social media website in existence. If you have an Amazon monthly shipment of dog food, not only does Amazon know it, so does every marketing company with a dog food client, so do all the big name data brokers like Lexis Nexis, Experian and Equifax, so does any company, entity, individual or political group with enough money to buy your data from Amazon. While social media sites keep things and sell them like your comments and pictures, Amazon keeps track of your bank data, or your credit card / debit card information, your address/addresses, your buying habits, people you have sent items to, such as friends and relatives. Do you buy diapers often in one size? Then you most likely have a child at home. Do you buy a certain type of smartphone cover? Amazon knows what phone you have. Do you order jewelry a lot? Clothing? Gadgets? Toys? All your purchasing habits create a wireframe of your life. A puzzle that can be analyzed and figured out by what you buy, maybe sell, reorder and browse. If you put things in your basket while you were logged in, that gets saved, even if you didn’t purchase it. Everything you searched for and looked at is saved.
Amazon is tracking and saving your personal information. They will not allow you to purchase from their website unless you add a payment method to keep online in their database. You can remove it after your purchase, but they don’t want you to, or they would allow guest checkouts which are anonymous to the extent that they don’t maintain or store your personal information on their website. Once they use it for shipping purposes, that data is deleted if you are a guest, but Amazon does not allow guest checkout and they keep your address information indefinitely. This information, like all our online data, is sold to a variety of buyers. Data brokers, large companies, political groups, marketers, advertisers, any individual with enough money can buy your data and know what you ordered from Amazon. Hackers can easily get access to their databases, no matter how much they claim their sites are secure. They don’t even have 2-step verification on their website, or any other critically important security mechanism. This is kind of bizarre, considering that they store the credit card numbers, names and addresses of millions of customers. Gmail, Soho and others have 2-step verification for your email and apps, but Amazon with access to your money doesn’t?
Even if you order from Amazon frequently, you shouldn’t be keeping your bank information on their databases. If they’re not going to safeguard your private information then you need to do it. If you find that your data is appearing online, it could be that some of that information is coming from sites like Amazon and eBay. It could also be coming from websites who buy your information, or from data brokers. Do a google search to ensure your home address, phone number and anything else you wouldn’t want to be online isn’t. While it’s important to not let e-commerce sites save our private data in their databases, often, despite our best efforts it’s too late and various data miners and data harvesters have already gotten some of your personal information. If you find your name and address are online, contact an internet removal service who can show you how to remove your information from the internet. They can also delete information and remove your address from the internet.
