[HN Gopher] Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of co... ___________________________________________________________________ Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium Author : Ansil849 Score : 311 points Date : 2022-03-27 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (theintercept.com) (TXT) w3m dump (theintercept.com) | whoknew1122 wrote: | Clicking on the author's byline, it says the author is a | 'security researcher focusing on privacy issues revolving around | source protection, counter-forensics, and privacy assurance.' I | would assume, therefore, the author would have at least passing | knowledge of security and web applications. | | > Amazon at this point makes some intonations about how this | email verification step is necessary because your privacy and | security are the company's top priority, though considering that | when your data is available you'll need to check your email | anyway, it's not clear how checking your email twice adds any | security. | | People can argue about whether email should be used for | authentication purposes. But what is the alternate model | suggested? From the formulation of the complaint, the author | seems to suggest that it'd be better if Amazon did not decouple | authentication and payload delivery. | | Sending the payload (in this case, a load of personal data) to an | email address without first checking whether the requestor is in | control of the address is a horrendously terrible idea. I'm | starting to wonder about the author's security chops. | | > Though Amazon says that it will "provide your information to | you as soon as we can," "soon" is apparently meant to be | interpreted on a monthly time scale, as the page further states | that "usually, this should not take more than a month." Though of | course, "in exceptional cases, for example if a request is more | complex or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it | might take longer." This protracted time frame forms an | intriguing juxtaposition to the otherwise universal emphasis on | speed that facilitates shopping on Amazon. | | It's much easier to put information into various databases than | it is to determine what databases contain information about a | particular user, and present that data to the user in a secure, | auditable manner. | | For example, you have to make sure that the user gets all the | information they asked for (which means you have to determine | whether the information exists, and if it doesn't you have to log | the nonexistance of the data, lest you be audited). And you need | to make sure user doesn't get information about someone else | (which has happened in the past). | | Distributed systems are hard. It takes time to determine where | all possible information could live. And you have to make sure | you're providing the correct information. And do this flawlessly, | every single time lest you open yourself up to bad press and | potential fines. This all takes time in systems as large and | distributed as Amazon. | | --- | | If the author is as knowledgeable in the security space as their | byline suggests, I'm left to think that their incurious write-up | is just trying to throw red meat at the 'We hate anything | associated with Amazon' crowd. | | For what it's worth, my team at AWS processes GDPR requests | within 3-or-so business days. But we can only do that because | there is a single data warehouse for our product/service. | alex_young wrote: | Perhaps all of this would be a lot easier if you actually built | some simple automation to process requests. What could possibly | take 3 days to process? The only plausible reason is that | you're wasting developers time on what really belongs in one of | the myriad tools AWS itself provides for such tasks. | plandis wrote: | There's nothing that's simple when you're dealing with 10s of | thousands of different datasets across many different | internal team and service boundaries with their own security | setup depending on the data that's being stored. | | The cost of automating and properly securing it (since | "gather all customer data into one place" is generally not | great as it's a single point of failure from a security | perspective). All of that isn't really worth it to spend the | effort automating if the total number of requests for data is | not that high. | alex_young wrote: | My reply was to one person presumably on a pizza team at | AWS. Surely they would realize some savings from automating | their own retrieval requests. | | As others have pointed out aggregating all of the different | reports into one download is a trivial task itself suited | well for automation. | [deleted] | jsnell wrote: | > Distributed systems are hard. It takes time to determine | where all possible information could live. And you have to make | sure you're providing the correct information. And do this | flawlessly, every single time lest you open yourself up to bad | press and potential fines. This all takes time in systems as | large and distributed as Amazon. | | This implies that Amazon is serving GDPR data requests | manually, rather than the whole process being automated. Surely | that can't be true? | | I agree that identifying where data can be stored, and | extracting it correctly, is a difficult problem. But that | problem is identical for every user, and it should only need to | be solved once. You aren't determining from scratch which | databases contain user data on every request, right? Nor are | you re-defining your export schema for each user, or re- | implementing the identity authentication, or deciding which | pieces of data don't need to be in the data export for some | legal reason, or any of these other systematic difficulties. | | And if this automated, why suggest that the difficulty applies | to serving each individual data access request rather than just | to defining and implemeting a repeatable process? | whoknew1122 wrote: | To create a script/bot/application/whatever that can access | all potential data, you have to give something read | privileges to possibly hundreds of backend systems and | products. This is horrendously bad idea security wise. If | that service account gets compromised (either from an | external or internal threat), you have a single account that | has access to everything Amazon stores. This is bad for the | company and bad for its customers. | | There necessarily have to be multiple workflows to maintain | the data segregation necessary to protect data at the scale | we're talking with Amazon. | | And assuming you could securely create this automated | workflow, you'd still need a person manually verifying the | end result to ensure that all the data scraped is in fact | owned by the person who made the request. Within the past | couple of years, there was a news story where someone got a | different person's Alexa data after asking Amazon for their | own data. That can't happen again. | jsnell wrote: | Sorry, I don't buy any of this. | | Automating the process doesn't need to imply that there's a | single service with direct access to all of the data. Just | from a basic software engineering perspective, it makes a | ton of sense each product's data export to be a separate | service owned by the product team, so no disagreements | there. But by talking about how hard it is to figure out | what data you have stored and export it correctly, you were | implying that you had no such per-product service either, | and each export is an artisanal custom job. | | The question of safeguards is interesting. I don't really | see how having a human in the loop is adding any real | security: a computer is going to be far better at deciding | whether the request is valid or not. As an operator, being | assigned a ticket to do an export of account 123456, what | are you going to do other than do that export? A computer, | on the other hand, can actually verify whether the request | is actually authorized. That can be done in a way where a | compromise of your central data export service account | can't be used to fake the authorization. | | (A quick design sketch for one option: each account has a | public key encryption keypair, managed by the identity | system. When the central data export service requests an | email verification, that is done via asking the identity | system to sign a ticket. The identity system triggers a | flow that asks the user to validate the request, and as | part of the flow informs them of just what operation they | are validating. User approval of the request signs the | ticket with their private key. This ticket is sent to each | data export service, which checks that the user id they're | exporting has signed the ticket, and that the ticket | contents match the request: i.e. same userid, operating is | a data export, the data export covers this service. You | will need to trust your identity system to not be | compromised, but if it is, you're completely screwed | anyway.) | | > And assuming you could securely create this automated | workflow, you'd still need a person manually verifying the | end result to ensure that all the data scraped is in fact | owned by the person who made the request. Within the past | couple of years, there was a news story where someone got a | different person's Alexa data after asking Amazon for their | own data. That can't happen again. | | The odds of a human doing a good job of this kind of | validation are basically zero. Either they are following a | checklist that a computer could execute more reliably, or | they are just randomly poking at some 1 GB data dump trying | to find the needle in the haystack. | alex_young wrote: | The automation would be a bigger risk than granting humans | carte blanche access to customer data? That seems like an | odd security conclusion. | whoknew1122 wrote: | GDPR requests are handled, at least in part, manually. I have | direct knowledge of how GDPR is handled within the | product/service I support. And yes, it's manual. | jsnell wrote: | Thanks! That's my mind blown, then :) I can believe that | the volume is low enough that manual work is acceptable, | but even then I'd have thought that you'd want things | entirely automated to eliminate the chance of human error. | whoknew1122 wrote: | I'm not sure how low in volume the requests are. It's | really hard to automate because you have to gather data | from many internal teams and products, and the data is | intentionally siloed to enhance customer privacy and data | security. | | Manual work isn't the best way to handle it, but the | costs of automating (in terms of security, intricacy | regarding different storage systems, etc.) is too high to | really automate it on a grand scale. | | Where I work, which is low traffic generally, we process | around 10 requests or so a week (from what I've seen). | Weryj wrote: | What I'm surprised we aren't talking about is the encrypted blobs | that Facebook provide when you download your data. With no | instructions on how to decrypt to view your actual data. | ozzythecat wrote: | From the article: | | > Given Amazon's obsession with speed and eliminating friction to | foster faster consumerism, the dawdling data solicitation process | seems like it just might be intentional, designed to dissuade | requests. | | > It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data | request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5 | days to process a data request, as per the company's California | Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020. There was no option for | expedited Amazon Prime data delivery and no button equivalent to | an instantaneous Buy Now (nee 1-Click) option when selecting my | data. | | When you use Amazon services, I don't think there is a single, | global database of all your data. Amazon has many different | offerings (prime video, alexa, music, photos, books) often with | many individual organizations and sets of teams within those | organizations. Each customer-facing feature is supported by some | N number of services, which collect and store data in different | systems. These can be modern day systems built from the ground up | with "privacy data reporting" as a first class feature, or they | could legacy systems that were built any time before GDPR and | other compliance laws came online. | | Some of these systems are write optimized as opposed to being | read optimized. Others aren't even backed by a relational or | NoSQL database. Instead, they may contain your data in some | format that you cannot quickly query in constant time. | | It makes little sense for Amazon or any other company to invest | hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to stand up entire | organizations to migrate off these systems - simply because a | median 1.5 day turnaround time is too high or so that Nikita | Mazurov doesn't have to wait 19 days. Presumably that 19 days is | closer to their 80th percentile or 90th percentile turn around | time. Under the GDPR legislation, a Google search shows that the | maximum turn around time under the law is about ~1 month. | | Any single system that has to integrate with practically | EVERYTHING else in your entire company is going to be complex, no | matter how much you try to simplify it. Your data may be stored | in some format that's meaningful if it's given to you as is. | | Or that data may be stored containing proprietary information. Or | it could contain implementation details. For instance, I've built | systems where we stored "magic numbers" in place of string into a | database, mainly to save on storage costs. I probably wouldn't | want to return those magic numbers to a customer, because it | would be meaningless. | | What I'm getting at is to even return one record from one | specific service isn't necessarily just a SELECT query (assuming | the data is stored in a relational db to being with). | | This article is full of outright negativity, trying to fuel | outrage and assuming everything on Amazon's side is malice, | incompetence, or some combination of both. I couldn't but help | and look up the author's page on The Intercept: | | > Nikita Mazurov is a security researcher focusing on privacy | issues revolving around source protection, counter-forensics, and | privacy assurance. | | I don't use such strong language on HN, but here's my own thesis: | This is an egregiously padded resume. Best case, it describes a | university student/researcher who has never actually solved any | real world problem. It's a combination of that fact and the fact | that this article was deliberately written in a way to generate | clicks by manufacturing outrage. | Sujan wrote: | It's not very often that each and every point in an article just | feels "fabricated" or over the top. | | It starts with finding the page: Amazon -> Customer Service -> | Search for "personal data" -> Search result #1 is "Request Your | Personal Information" which nicely explains what to do and links | directly to that page. | | The need to verify or activate a data request via clicking a | link? Of course required so some third party can not just request | your data to your inbox (and process it along the way) without | you actually wanting to do that. | | All the mentions that most of the data is available in your | Amazon account? Well, what many people are looking for (order | history etc) is and even nicely formatted, searchable and cross | linked to make it much more convenient. | | Clicking "Remove address" only removes it from the list of | addresses? Of course, addresses you ordered to in the past can | not be deleted as they have to legally be stored together with | other order information. | | And the list goes on and on. | | I get that it is scary that a big company keeps all the data you | gave to them. And it is also unfortunate for you that it is not | their business goal to make it instant and pretty for you to look | at all the data. But there is no reason for them to do that. | | If you don't want Amazon to have your data, don't user Amazon. | When you use Amazon, the way you can get a lot of data from them | is actually pretty good (also compared to other companies which | pretent search history does not exist and so on). | | (And bye to some Hacker News points. This will get nicely | downvoted I suspect.) | [deleted] | jen20 wrote: | > But there is no reason for them to do that. | | If that is not their business goal, perhaps the GDPR needs to | be strengthened and strongly enforced until it is. | Sujan wrote: | That is certainly a political decision that can be made, I | agree and would actually be happy about that. | | If that happens, I am sure Amazon will invest the time and | money to comply with that. At the same time it will put many | smaller business out of business though, as they do not have | the resources to do that. Even the current state of having to | fulfill data requests is quite a problem for mayn of them. | Nextgrid wrote: | I am getting quite tired of the "small businesses" argument | about the GDPR. It's starting to become the "think of the | children" equivalent but for data protection. | | Would you also be against food safety or physical product | regulations (ban of leaded solder or other toxic | chemicals)? After all, those can and do affect small | restaurants and other businesses as well. | Sujan wrote: | I don't think comparing food safetey or toxic chemicals | that hurt your health to the design, usability and | accessibility of a data export is very valid. The parent | argument was not about not having to export data at all. | It was about how well designed it was. | Nextgrid wrote: | The "small businesses" argument is brought up in every | discussion of the GDPR including much worse | transgressions than merely bad UX in the data export | process. I was not exclusively referring to this | particular instance. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | In general, no! But if someone proposed that all | restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random | samples of their food to check for spoilage and cross- | contamination, I would have very similar questions about | where the taco shack down the street is supposed to find | an affordable chemical lab. Making it "instant and pretty | for you to look at all the data" is a large, expensive | endeavor and I don't see why it's necessary to achieve | the regulatory goals here. | Nextgrid wrote: | > But if someone proposed that all restaurants should | perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food | | To be fair, people propose things all the time. It only | becomes law when enough people agree that it is needed. | That process isn't always perfect but in general it | works. | | The reason we don't have a "General Food Safety | Regulation" is that the current situation is good enough, | either because the existing regulations are sufficient or | that the industry can self-regulate (as it's usually bad | for business to poison your customers). As a result, in | most Western countries, you can be confident that any | business that sells food will not poison you. | | If we suddenly had a food poisoning epidemic because all | vendors were unscrupulous and selling spoiled food, I | would totally be in favour of stronger regulations even | if it means small taco shacks can't compete. Having to go | to a farther/more expensive place that _can_ afford such | checks is a price I (and I suspect most other people) am | willing to pay if it means not getting food poisoning. | | The GDPR came to be because it was determined that the | existing data protection regulations were inadequate | _and_ the industry demonstrated that can 't be trusted to | self-regulate. | jen20 wrote: | > they do not have the resources to do that. | | Good - the aim is for them to not store personal data in | the first place, much less build business models that rely | upon it. Rather than allowing the population to take on the | negative externality of surveillance capitalism, it is | absolutely right that the burden must fall on those | creating the problem. | | I don't see this as any different to the complain that | small restaurants cannot afford to pay their workers - if | they can't afford to comply, they can't afford to be in | business at all. It's simply a margin problem. | Sujan wrote: | The parent argument was about "to make it instant and | pretty for you to look at all the data." - not GDPR in | general, which I fully agree with and like very much. It | is a very different thing if you give users the power to | get their data, or want to force companies to present | that data in a way laypersons can understand and "like". | mindslight wrote: | You're giving the argument too much credit. It's more | akin to a large restaurant arguing that small restaurants | could be put out of business by health inspections, so | maybe we should hold off on the idea. Rather, keeping a | clean kitchen is something they all should be doing | anyway from the get go. | | Any pain for Amazon in Amazon's process is entirely | Amazon's fault. If systems are built with the requirement | of letting users export their data, then the additional | effort to do so is trivial. This argument about the GDPR | essentially boils down to _technical debt_ from companies | that played fast and loose with personal information, and | we shouldn 't entertain it. | plandis wrote: | > If systems are built with the requirement of letting | users export their data, then the additional effort to do | so is trivial. | | It's unreasonable, IMO, to think that companies should | have had the foresight to see legislation that would | happen two decades after the company had already existed | and as a result build a system for retrieving user data | that has no profit generating potential. | | GDPR is good because prior to it there really wasn't any | economic incentive to provide this information. | guitarbill wrote: | Europeans have valued privacy and data protection for | quite a while now culturally. The ePrivacy Directive is | from 2002 (derisively referred to as the "cookie law"). | And GDPR had a multi-year grace period. It's simply a | result of companies ignoring building these kind of | functionality for far too long. | dmitriid wrote: | 1. Privacy legislation existed in European countries for | years (and often for _decades_ ) | | 2. GDPR was in the works for several years, and when it | went in effect, companies were given _2 years_ to become | compliant | | 3. GDPR went into effect _5 years_ ago, and has been | enforced for _3 years_ | | So please stop with the "poor companies could not foresee | this, and didn't have the time to implement this" | mindslight wrote: | You're implying that arbitrary "legislation" just arose | out of the blue. Rather, it's based on a long held idea | that companies are merely trustees for customers' data. | So their position is more akin to having built a shed | straddling a property line a decade ago, and now | complaining that they couldn't have known that their | neighbor might eventually want it moved. | plandis wrote: | I never said GDPR is arbitrary legislation. In fact, I | called it a good thing in my initial post. | | My point is that without legislation companies generally | are not going to do things that don't make them profit | directly or indirectly. Aggregating user data for users | to see is not something that really generates revenue and | so companies prior to GDPR didn't really do this en | masse. | mindslight wrote: | Your argument rests on the idea that the GDPR was an | unforeseeable (arbitrary) requirement, rather than a | straightforward implementation of a predictably-relevant | Schelling point. While businesses won't go out of their | way to do things that don't generate revenue, it's not | unreasonable to think they will do some basic forward- | looking due diligence. When storing personal information | on a whole bunch of people is a core part of your | business, it's reasonable to expect that eventually those | people will want some control over the records kept on | them. | passivate wrote: | Small business have fewer customers. I imagine their | workload will scale down to manageable levels. If not there | will be market demand to create automation for whatever out | of the box system they're using to maintain data. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Those smaller businesses will just use a standard webshop | package that will incorporate this feature because most of | their customers will want it.. The same way these companies | use stuff like Magento or PrestaShop instead of rolling | their own. | Sujan wrote: | Exactly. But that will something additional they will | have to buy (and install, and maintain) if GDPR would | include to "make it instant and pretty for you to look at | all the data.". Because that is what the parent | discussion was about. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Hmm I doubt it really. I think most webshops will just | include this feature. | lelandfe wrote: | > each and every point in an article just feels "fabricated" or | over the top. | | What I thought were valid points from the article: | | - Unclear data: "cryptic strings of numbers like | '26,444,740,832,600,000" for various search queries." This is | easily the worst offender IMO. | | - A wait time of 19 days | | - Separating the download into 74 buttons | Sujan wrote: | True, those are kind of valid. | | The unresolved foreign keys are indeed unfortunate, I | wondered about these myself when I got my takeouts in the | past. I explained them to myself as something that is not | actually available in the same datastore to query or join, | but maybe a constant or some other system that does not | include personal data. Still not nice of course. | | I think the wait time and many download buttons were | discussed extensively in other comments here. With cold | storage as explanation for the duraiton, and just no legal | need to make the takeout _convenient_, those also have a | pretty good explanation I would say. | | So valid, but still no scandal. | xhkkffbf wrote: | Yup. I agree. The wait time doesn't make sense. They should | be able to spin up extra servers from the spot market in | seconds. Even if they're using Glacier, that should only be a | few hours. | | I wonder if they execute the 74 data queries in serial to | drag it out. | | And the multiple downloads is just bogus. | | That being said, I agree with the general point that the | article is a bit overly dramatic. Amazon does a pretty good | job with the request. It just takes too long. | thayne wrote: | I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was a human | involved in gathering some of the data. If requests for | data are rare enough, it might be more economical to pay | someone in a customer support farm to collect some data | than to pay for developing and maintaining an automated | process. At least in the short term. Otoh, not automating | something like this seems out of character for Amazon. | blip54321 wrote: | I've worked at an organization with a similar timeframe for | some types of data requests (B2B, not GDPR-style ones). | There were many parts of the organization which were | mismanaged, but that wasn't one of them. That type of data | request ("get all my data") involved walking through all | the data we had. It wasn't indexed in a way which made it | easy to grab. | | This was an expensive batched job we ran monthly. We spun | up a cluster of cloud machines. A map-reduce style | operation would organize the data by customer. We'd ship it | off to all the customers who requested it that month. | | Adding appropriate indexes or similar would have been man- | years of engineering work. This involved, for example, | walking through server logs line-by-line and seeing which | ones were associated with which customer. | | There wasn't a compelling business case to do that. For | normal operations, once a month was fine. If a customer had | a particular need,, we could hypothetically do a one-off | request out-of-line, but customers used the data for types | of analytics where a one-month delay wasn't an issue. | | I know of other pipelines with similar delays, for example, | due to lack of automation. A person runs a task once a | month, and automation would cost more than a person. | | I won't chalk this up to dark patterns, so much as speeding | things up having zero business value to Amazon. I just | walked through the process, and at least the first two | steps seemed very normal. Amazon sometimes does outrageous | things, but here, I saw nothing to get outraged about. | encoderer wrote: | I helped build a system for privacy compliance at a large | non-faang tech company. Honestly 19 days seems crazy but | this is what we dealt with: | | It's 2018 and you have to bolt this mass export/delete on | _every_ stateful service in your company. Many of these are | "critical" services that are not actively worked on and | have a very limited maintenance budget. That is, some team | with a lot of existing responsibilities absorbed it along | the way and they have no bandwidth for it. | | So in some cases their mechanisms for retrieval/deletion | were pretty egregious and so we agreed on a rate limit and | we would queue these requests up and handle all of the | paperwork. You get 30 days to comply and if you need | another 30 all you have to do is send an update within the | first 30. | | So, quite possibly, they have a rate limit and a queue on | at least a handful of backend services and it truly truly | does not matter as long as the queue is under 60 days. | latexr wrote: | > And bye to some Hacker News points. | | The lowest score you can get on a comment is -4 | (https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- | undocumented#downvo...). | | > This will get nicely downvoted I suspect. | | Complaining about downvotes before they happen is more likely | to get you downvotes than anything else you wrote in that post. | Sujan wrote: | Oh, I did not know that. Thanks. A bit less "aversion" then | for the future. | | My last sentence was triggered by having written a comment on | another comment first, which insantly went to -3 (but later | kinda recovered), so I almost didn't write this one, just not | to have to get the negative feeling. It's a nice Sunday after | all. | inopinatus wrote: | Don't sweat it. None of us will lay upon our death-beds | wishing we had scored more points in an internet popularity | contest. | | Sometimes a downvote is because you made a salient and | equitable point that threatened someone's cookie jar, an | angry conservative enraged that someone expressed a | progressive view (and vice versa), some humourless bastard | who failed or declined to recognise what you thought to be | in obvious jest, or a narcissistic asshole incensed that | you dared observe their poor behaviour. These you may | consider to be upvotes in disguise. | | Notwithstanding all this, I suspect you will also discover | there's a strong current of support for those surgically | dismantling yellow journalism. | dylan604 wrote: | >The need to verify or activate a data request via clicking a | link? Of course required so some third party can not just | request your data to your inbox (and process it along the way) | without you actually wanting to do that. | | You mean like some data hoarding company that offers free email | that scans all of your messages to provide better "sorting", | provide quickly accessible Tracking buttons, or similar | features? Would something like that be considered doing evil? | | >(And bye to some Hacker News points. This will get nicely | downvoted I suspect.) | | meh. The loss of 4 points is nothing when making valid points | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > Clicking "Remove address" only removes it from the list of | addresses? Of course, addresses you ordered to in the past can | not be deleted as they have to legally be stored together with | other order information. | | I agree. The author set out with an agenda and spun every step | of the process in the most negative way they could come up | with. | | There are some legitimate complaints (wait time, for example) | but it's hard to take these articles seriously when it's clear | that the author started with a conclusion and tried to work | backward to build a story around it. | | Sadly, these articles get a lot of clicks and shares because | "your data" has become a nebulous scare phrase in journalism | and Amazon is a popular company to hate right now. | | That said, I bet if any one of our own employers was subjected | to the same treatment by the same author with the same agenda, | we wouldn't come out much better. If someone wants to smear a | company, they will. | | Data export can be very confusing for end users, especially | when they discover things like their shipping record with old | addresses isn't deleted when they remove the address from their | address book. The old shipping records are necessary for | everything from customer support to warrant claims to fraud | detection to recall notices to regulatory compliance. Trying to | shame Amazon for literally just keeping shipping records is | bananas. | naoqj wrote: | >I get that it is scary that a big company keeps all the data | you gave to them. | | Situation in 2022: it is scary that someone has something I | willingly gave them. | Sujan wrote: | There still is no viable sarcasm tag for plain text that | everyone will pick up :) | jjulius wrote: | Define "willing" in this context, though. You, myself and | most people on HN have a really good idea of what data we | willingly give Amazon, while the average person does not. Is | it really an accurate statement that people willingly give | them their data when they don't actually know what they're | giving? | naoqj wrote: | What data does Amazon have that you haven't given them? | msrenee wrote: | Well shoot, I've never thought of it that way. I guess | it's perfectly reasonable that they've extrapolated my | behavior out so they know when to raise the price of | items I intend to purchase. Yep, not underhanded at all. | jjulius wrote: | You're misunderstanding. I will rephrase: | | You said that everyone "willingly" gives Amazon their | data. The average person does not know what kind of data | Amazon collects on them, therefore I am positing that | it's not fair to say that they are willingly giving it | over. | naoqj wrote: | Do you think that if you asked random people something | like... | | "Do you think that Amazon stores a list of the items that | you have bought from them and the addresses where they | sent them" | | ...the majority would say no? | jjulius wrote: | And if you asked them to tell you every other bit of data | Amazon collects on them, do you think they would be able | to tell you what all of that is? Because common knowledge | within the tech community - _and as evidenced in the | article we are discussing_ - make very clear that that 's | not the only data they gather on you. | akerl_ wrote: | The average non-technical person I've talked to has | posited that Amazon is actively, persistently listening | via their Alexa-enabled devices and using that audio to | drive recommendations. | | This doesn't seem to deter any of the people who've | mentioned it from purchasing and plugging in Alexa- | enabled devices, or from shopping on Amazon. | | I don't think you're giving non-technical people enough | credit. They may not know the exact mechanisms, but | they're generally aware that companies are monitoring | their activity and using it to market to them; it's just | not a big deal to them. | kerng wrote: | I think you misunderstand the comment the other commenter | made - there is a lot of info Amazon has about one that | is collected via dark patterns. | | Also, Don't they also buy data from 3rd parties to | augment what you give them? Like stats of credit card | purchases and stuff? Always assuming that all these big | players do that. | jjulius wrote: | >Also, Don't they also buy data from 3rd parties to | augment what you give them? Like stats of credit card | purchases and stuff? Always assuming that all these big | players do that. | | They do! That's even mentioned in this article. | onphonenow wrote: | Agreed, I have successfully downloaded my order history from | the beginning of my account, very interesting to look through. | Though I'm not sure why I was buying solaris books in 1999 :) | Others like enders game I still remember. | msrenee wrote: | That search you suggested doesn't appear to exist in the app. | You mind telling me how to access this data through the app if | it's so easy? | Sujan wrote: | For me (amazon.de, EN language setting): Open app -> "More" | burger menu botton right (three horizontal lines stacked on | top of each other) -> Scroll down to "Customer service" -> | Scroll down to search feature -> "Personal Information" -> | #1. I think this is really just a webview to the same part of | the website with a different design. | | Takes a bit more tapping and scrolling than clicking on | desktop, but that is more he fault of the smaller screen and | how apps work I would guess. | msrenee wrote: | Ah, it was only like 5 options deep and then it gave me a | chat "assistant" which I used to search the term "my data" | which gave me the link and the drop down box mentioned in | the article to scroll to the bottom of to request my data. | Which sent an email to my husband's email address that I | need to open to confirm the request. Super easy. Not hidden | at all. | kerng wrote: | I like this detailed walk throughs, although obviously subjective | it reflects well on the many obstacles and dark patterns that are | put in the way. | | The "funniest" one certainly is that there are dozens of download | buttons to actually download the data in the end. | | So, it seems understandable that the author got quite frustrated | with this process Amazon built. | yoaviram wrote: | I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org, a service which | automates the process of sending data requests (it's free, open | source and were a registered charity). What is described in this | article is, unfortunately, a common case with _some_ big tech | companies. | | I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion | requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's dark | patterns all the way down. | | The solution is to escalate your request to the local data | protection agency (attorney general in case of California). I | believe that if enough of us do this it will make a difference, | even in the case of Amazon. | | Following this realization we've recently added an optional | features which will follow up with you some time after a request | is made, and depending on the outcome, offer to automate the | escalation process. | ramphastidae wrote: | I have been asking a broker to remove my data for weeks and | they are giving me the runaround. However, I'm not in CA | (another US state). Anything I can do? | yoaviram wrote: | Please send me an email with the details (it's on the | website). | lelandfe wrote: | > I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion | requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's | dark patterns all the way down. | | I would love to read a long form piece on your findings! | | It sounds like it would a great way to advertise | YourDigitalRights as well. | yoaviram wrote: | We're going to be speaking about this at Good Tech Fest 2022 | [1], and will also write it up post it to HN. | | https://www.goodtechfest.com/good-tech-fest-2022 | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | "I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion | requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens." | | Another idea for an experiment is to send 600 data deletion | requests from 600 unique computer users simultaneously to a | single data broker and see what happens. If the escalation | process is automated when the data broker fails to respond, the | most interesting results IMO will be from the data protection | agency. It is difficult to ignore 600 cases. It also tests the | broker's and agency's systems. In theory these systems should | be able to scale. If they cannot, then it is arguable the | broker and/or agency is making an assumption that privacy is | something that only some people, a relatively small number, | care about. At the very least there would be a question of | whether these systems are adequate for what they are supposed | to do. | | This experiment might be thought of like a petition that | requires a minimum number of signatures. What is the purpose | behind having petitions and minimums for the number of people | who sign them. Here, a minimum number of people must sign on to | make a data deletion request before the bundle of requests are | actually sent. | bobmichael wrote: | That's so great. I wish there was something like this for | Germany. | yoaviram wrote: | We support the GDPR, so it will work in Germany. | bobmichael wrote: | When I went to the German site and tried to generate a data | request, the generated email was in English. Is that | intended? I think I'm Germany you're much more likely to | get a response if you write in German. | vmception wrote: | Can we have a non profit for this? I think one of the issues | for getting tax exempt status is designating a "charitable | class" of people that it would be helping | verve_rat wrote: | Um, they are a charity? | vmception wrote: | > Conscious Digital MTU is a registered Estonian non-profit | organization number 80600079. | | Ah they are, wonder about the US version | | The tax deductibility for us tax residents is a working | major incentive | mahastore wrote: | What is the process of getting all my data collected by GOOGLE | and MICROSOFT? | yoaviram wrote: | https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/google.com | https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/microsoft.com | https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/apple.com | https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/walmart.com | mahastore wrote: | and APPLE? | mahastore wrote: | and WALMART | [deleted] | TeeMassive wrote: | You're doing privacy a great service, you're charity is | awesome! | | Are your services also work outside of the US, like, say, | Canada? | yoaviram wrote: | Thank you! We are about to launch support for the Brazilian | LGPD, and have 17 other regulations we want to support this | year, including Canada. | oriettaxx wrote: | I tried one time, they wrote me they where going to send me my | data, but never did (!) | | I gave up | | I'll try again now :) | oriettaxx wrote: | "more than a month" :) | | > Data Request Confirmation | | > We've received and are processing your request to access your | personal data. | | > We will provide your information to you as soon as we can. | | > Usually, this should not take more than a month. | | >In exceptional cases, for example if a request is more complex | or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it might | take longer, but if so we will notify you that there will be a | delay. | oyebenny wrote: | My Amazon account got accessed from within. Several Amazon | employees/reps confirm it. But when I asked who and what happened | to the employees who did they don't tell me anything. It's | ANNOYING. | bigyellow wrote: | shadowgovt wrote: | > It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data | request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5 | days to process a data request, as per the company's California | Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020. | | That's interesting but not particularly surprising. I bet the | median request isn't for _all_ data. An all-data request may | involve pulling data from cold-storage, which I 'm not surprised | would take 2+ weeks (it's quite possibly a relatively manual | process). | rdiddly wrote: | The article would be stronger if it didn't overreact and | exaggerate, but then again I do appreciate the sarcasm. The 74 | zip files are the most egregious part of it though. You can't zip | those mofos into one file? It's spiteful somehow, like you asked | for water and Amazon said "Here you go" and threw it in your | face. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | The full, complete set of tedium the author describes is: | | * Navigate through a handful of pages. | | * Scroll to the bottom of a menu. | | * Click an email confirmation link. | | * Wait 19 days. | | * Click 74 download links. | | That last part is pretty dumb! But it's also the only thing that | seems remotely tedious, and I'm not sure where at any point he'd | be confused. The author implies some sort of issue with the 19 | day waiting period, but it seems entirely plausible to me that | many of the datasets being requested have "ask an engineer to run | through this long manual process" as a dependency. | whoknew1122 wrote: | Distributed systems store information in different databases | and warehouses. You don't want your Amazon.com retail data co- | mingled with Alexa data for multiple reasons. Two of the | preeminent security concepts is least privilege and data | segregation. | | Your data exists in different files and databases. That's why | you get multiple files containing your data. And let's ignore | that the zip archives contain files of different types. | | If all the files were of the same type, what would you prefer, | that Amazon edit these files and combine them into a single | file? How could you prove that Amazon didn't edit out any files | maliciously? | | The typical way to verify file integrity is by checking hash | sums. But here you don't have access to the original hashes | (because they're internal Amazon files). Even if you had access | to the hashes, we know the hashes wouldn't match because we're | presupposing that the files have been modified to combine them. | | If they were to combine all the files together, there would be | no way for Amazon to document that nothing was changed. Which | means the process isn't auditable, and people will come up with | conspiracies about how big bad Amazon is sanitizing files | before sending them out. | shadowgovt wrote: | > what would you prefer, that Amazon edit these files and | combine them into a single file | | This, additionally, adds the complication that they could be | accused of making the data onerous to access by providing it | as a monolithic zip, too big for some users to download over | unreliable connections. | jkaplowitz wrote: | 74 zip files could themselves be added unmodified as 74 | individual entries within a parent zip file, optionally, for | ease of download convenience. The hashes of those 74 zip | files within the parent zip file would be just as auditable | as with the current process. | whoknew1122 wrote: | That's true, but then people will complain that they had to | unzip 75 files instead of 74. The real issue here is that | there are 74 files. Which is an issue without a good | solution. | folmar wrote: | Unzipping 75 files is a one click job on any reasonably | current system I know of. | pacaro wrote: | I very much doubt that there is any human interaction on the | Amazon end of this workflow. | | What seems more likely is that because this doesn't generate | revenue it gets the minimum resources necessary to complete the | request within some legally mandated time frame. The request | probably sits in queues for most of its life. | | If a court order requests these same data, I suspect that it | can be produced in under 24 hours | whoknew1122 wrote: | And you'd be wrong. There are humans involved at every level | of GDPR requests. | | Signed, | | Someone who has handled such requests for AWS | pacaro wrote: | That feels like an untenable solution, it wouldn't take | much to create a denial of service... | shadowgovt wrote: | Very little about GDPR was designed with technical | reality in mind. It's a grand example of using the mallet | of law to try and beat the world into the shape someone | wants it in, ignorant of _why_ it 's in the shape it's | currently in. | [deleted] | mschuster91 wrote: | > That last part is pretty dumb! | | It's not just dumb, the whole process is at the edges of the | law. Art. 12 GDPR mandates "intelligible and easily accessible | form", which navigating through a number of pages, wait times | and finally a 74-link download is certainly not fulfilling. | | The gold standard, for what it's worth, is a direct link from | the privacy policy page in the section that details GDPR | subject rights to the page that provides the download - | basically, three clicks in total. | | > but it seems entirely plausible to me that many of the | datasets being requested have "ask an engineer to run through | this long manual process" as a dependency. | | Which is ridiculous for a company at Amazon's scale and again | at the edges of legality - Art. 12 GDPR mandates "without undue | delay" and the one month is clearly meant as an upper bound | here, not as the regular case. | | That is the problem with American companies and also the US | government: they _all_ default to hoard data in warehouses and | make use of it later, and completely ignoring that all the data | they hoard must also be made accessible to the people it 's | related to. | plandis wrote: | Clicking a bunch of links is pretty accessible, perhaps | you're translating accessible to convenient? | mschuster91 wrote: | The spirit of the GDPR law was to make life for people | easier. Putting hoops in front of users that are clearly | not needed - Amazon could, for example, offer a single ZIP | file like Twitter does - _will_ some day earn them trouble. | shadowgovt wrote: | This is yet another example of how the GDPR is bad law. | "Intelligible and easily accessible" is way too vague. | | Are 74 zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of | course not! I don't want to pull 74 links! | | Is 1 zip file intelligible and easily accessible? Of course | not! Way too big to pull in over my low-bandwidth connection. | | Are zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of course | not! Not everyone understands compression. | | ...etc., etc. I'd have a lot more respect for that law if it | spelled out concretes instead of handwaving technical details | and leaving it up to regulators to decide what passes and | what doesn't. | dmitriid wrote: | This is yet another example of a random commenter on HN | parroting "GPDR bad" nonsense while being intentionally | obtuse. | | Laws are often written with "common sense" in mind. HN | commentators prefer to eschew common sense to try and | excuse bad actors, bad behaviour, bad UX, bad anything. | mschuster91 wrote: | That is how laws are usually written. Hashing out the | details will be done by the courts. | hamiltonians wrote: | having to wait 19 days is really unnaceptable. the rest are | just annoying | robertlagrant wrote: | I can imagine it takes a month so older backups can cycle out and | then don't have to dredge up data they're about to no longer keep | on you anyway. | amelius wrote: | Has anyone tried to get their data from Apple? Was the experience | any different? | micromacrofoot wrote: | I'm more of an anti-Facebook bias person myself | [deleted] | ourmandave wrote: | Probably easier to buy it off the Dark Web. | | And what is the Bitcoin to Bezo Bucks conversion rate right now? | Terry_Roll wrote: | One the things people can ask for is who data is shared with. Its | a massive paper trail but so many entities dont want to comply | with data protection laws, its not just big tech its any large | entity because interpretation of the laws is so vague, but thats | the beauty of legislation, its vague. | noasaservice wrote: | > It's a bit like if you have a stalker who's been shadowing you | around, meticulously documenting everywhere you go, everyone you | talk to, and everything you do, who's now handing you a form to | fill out if you want to see the boxes of files they've been | keeping on you. | | This has me thinking. I can get an injunction for a human stalker | who's going after me at home, my workplace, following me wherever | I go, etc. | | According to US law, companies are also people. So, why can't I | get an injunction against, say, Facebook/Meta ? | | Get enough of these injunctions, and these shitty privacy- | invading data blackholes would dry up pretty quick. If they | don't, then they'd be liable for violating court orders. That | usually never ends up well. | amelius wrote: | Because you clicked Yes on their EULA. | noasaservice wrote: | I said facebook for a *very* specific reason: | https://medium.com/@SpiderOak/facebook-shadow-profiles-a- | pro... | | There's absolutely NO agreement with shadow profiles. | | And on to your EULA excuse - show the court that: | | 1. That YOU accepted a EULA | | 2. That the EULA was even presented | | 3. That the EULA agreed (if proven) is the same one withe the | onerous terms | | 4. That the user didn't revoke permissions (affirmative | consent is a thing) | amelius wrote: | I agree with you, but it might be difficult to prove that | someone is keeping a shadow profile. | Sujan wrote: | The difference between a stalker and Amazon is that Amazon does | not get any data from you (or at least 99% of what this author | could request from Amazon, some ad tracking stuff might be an | exception) if you do not willingy give it to them. Don't have | an Amazon account and use it do order things or search, talk to | Alexa, etc - and they will have no data. | mirntyfirty wrote: | I'd think that like fb, they collect data on individuals | regardless of accounts. One example of this is their facial | recognition services. Given that they force higher pricing of | products not on their page, it becomes challenging to simply | "go somewhere else." It's also been shown that they extract | business data from their aws customers. | GekkePrutser wrote: | This totally disregards the concept of shadow profiles.. | elygre wrote: | I did this myself a month ago or so. In addition to the process | and the multiple downloads, I was very fascinated to discover | that many reports were delivered as PDF. Why would that be, if | not to make it more difficult to access? | y04nn wrote: | I had to click through more than 100 links to download all the | data, how can this be acceptable? Specially coming from Amazon. | How hard is it for them to create an archive with all the data? | This is ridiculous, I can't imagine how was the meeting when they | decided to produce purposefully such garbage UX. | MaxGanzII wrote: | Exactly the problem I had. | | It would take Amazon almost no effort to make a single archive | with all those files in. | | I cannot help but view this as deliberate obstruction. | ok123456 wrote: | Can't you open up the developer tools use a css query to select | all the buttons, and send a click event to them all? | NelsonMinar wrote: | Here's a picture of the UI for the download, with 123 different | "Download" buttons. | https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1503848290193862658 | | I did an Amazon download too, after Amazon's subsidiary | Goodreads lost all my data of 9 years. I'm grateful for how the | GDPR and the CCPA mandate that companies provide data | downloads. Amazon is clearly doing the bare minimum to comply. | Other companies do more; Twitter's data download comes with a | fully working offline Javascript app for reading and searching | your tweets! | IshKebab wrote: | Pretty sure there are a gazillion browser extensions that can | do that for you. Not ideal but hardly the end of the world. | gentleman11 wrote: | When you buy from Amazon, you are supporting their various awful | practices. Yes, you | m1gu3l wrote: | I will never be able to reconcile humans simultaneous need for | everything to be good and pure but you know also cheap shit. | Accept and embrace the gray area we all live in. | eranation wrote: | The multiple download buttons is not a dark pattern to prevent | you from downloading your data, it's just bad UX, it's a feature | you add to check a legal box and it doesn't get priority for | usability. Probably someone just shrugged, this is good enough | and moved on. They should definitely give you it all in one zip | file but "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately | explained by a developer rushing to get something done by making | it just barely usable" (the fact I worked at AWS as a development | manager has nothing to do with the above and is solely my | opinion) | bryanrasmussen wrote: | Ok well, the same thing could be said by any organization in | the world regarding any dark pattern ascribed to them. | | As far as never ascribing, if a company is super big and rich | and would find it beneficial if people give up trying to do | something because of bad UX I think it's a reasonable | assumption that the bad UX is an example of a dark pattern. | Otherwise this helpful concept to describe actual things that | companies do to tire out users and get them to relent in doing | things the companies don't want done would have to disappear. | | TLDR: If what Amazon is doing here isn't a dark pattern, what | is? | 7373737373 wrote: | Even if this were the case, it'd still be customer time | neglicience. This is one of the largest companies in the world | MaxGanzII wrote: | > it's just bad UX | | "Bad" I would say means you can still achieve your task. | | I was presented with over sixty download links, and not being | an idiot or someone to be taken for a ride, I refused to go | along with it, and that means the UI is not bad but _failed_. | | What's more, it OBVIOUSLY failed. | | There's no way a single person at Amazon could have genuinely | sat there and thought, "yes, this, THIS is it, THIS is the | right way to make this page", not, that is, if their goal was | the user actually getting hold of their data. | the_duke wrote: | Is the ridiculously annoying process for ending your Prime | subscription also just accidental, bad UX? | | It miraculously uses very similar patterns. | mirntyfirty wrote: | True, and the ridiculously easy process to accidentally sign | up for a subscription to each of your smallest of purchases. | charcircuit wrote: | It makes sense that Amazon would dedicate resources to | making the sign up processes easier because it actually | makes them more money compared to making the cancelling | easier. That would be a waste of time to work on. | hamiltonians wrote: | This is unnaceptable given how inportant user interface is the | rest of the site. one click shopping | JaimeThompson wrote: | If the developers felt rushed to make such a feature that is | the fault of their management but given the history of Amazon | which includes publicly facing service status boards that don't | update unless senior management approve the outage it is more | likely that Amazon doesn't really want people to know what they | know about their users. | r_singh wrote: | Does anyone know if companies are obliged to do this in india? | gigel82 wrote: | Yes, they have multiple download buttons and it takes a bit, but | I got the same with Google; it only took a few minutes to | download the data once made available. | | I was most surprised by the sheer amount of audio data kept: in | my case, more than 5Gb of wave files dating back to when I set up | my first Alexa 6 years ago. I believe at least 50% of everything | Alexa heard in my house is recorded there. That's when I started | looking for an offline alternative, since -after the initial | novelty wore off- we're only using it to listen to music, turn | on/off smart home lights and ask the occasional random question | (convert C to F, etc.). | inopinatus wrote: | One of those relatively few circumstances where structuring the | company into service teams is nothing but a hurdle, rather than a | net advantage, to delivering on customer expectations. | gorgoiler wrote: | HN probably aren't _required_ to let me download my data, but it | sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site? | rdiddly wrote: | You can do it if you know how to use an API. See the 'API' link | at the bottom of the page. | oauea wrote: | Will this include all logs & data that aren't publicly | visible? The HN software employs various dark patterns such | as shadowbanning & rate limiting accounts, all this info | would have to be disclosed to, in addition to any internal | communication about your account. | [deleted] | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | Really? I would have expected a bigger outcry if GDPR et | al. required disclosure of shadowbanning & rate limits; | could you possibly direct me to where I can find the exact | requirements? Because that sounds like great fun to go | exercise. | gdulli wrote: | I consider HN to be one of the most user hostile sites there is | regarding user content because they don't allow deleting | comments. They force people into making a manual request. Which | means the feature essentially doesn't exist for casual use. | inopinatus wrote: | The right to be forgotten is in tension with the need to | preserve public discourse. | | Nevertheless I have deleted many comments within the | available regret window. I do wonder whether they're actually | removed from storage, or merely elided by software. | GekkePrutser wrote: | I'm sure it does as many third party clients offer features | where you can read back your own posts etc. | karlicoss wrote: | I'm personally using https://github.com/dogsheep/hacker-news- | to-sqlite#usage, it's great. You basically just need your | username and that's it | GekkePrutser wrote: | Ooh nice thanks for the tip!! | | I'm making a "life log" system that stores stuff I do | online automatically. This will come in very handy. | karlicoss wrote: | Oooh, I'm a big fun of lifelogging! You might want to | check out some of my projects like | https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme :) | GekkePrutser wrote: | Nice, I had no idea this was already 'a thing' :) Thanks | again for this! | | What I want to do is indeed capture my emails, social | media posts, photos, location data and chats (I run | everything through Matrix anyway so that's pretty easy). | And then store it in a database (or just a filesystem per | day, not sure about that yet - I see your concerns about | databases for this and I agree). With the more sensitive | stuff GPG encrypted. | | I'll see if your projects can help me out with this, | thanks! Like you say in your readme, indeed my goal is to | regain control of my information. And enable myself to | actually do something with it. | NelsonMinar wrote: | Actually, that's a question; the GDPR (Europe) and the CCPA | (California) both require data download options. I don't know | if Hacker News is a business that qualifies for this regulation | though. | jrmann100 wrote: | Wired Magazine recently did a feature on "Amazon's Dark Secret" | of what this mess looks like from the inside: | | https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-failed-to-protect-your-da... | mark_l_watson wrote: | That is something that I like about Google. It only takes a | minute to get to what they admit to data they have collected. | Also easy to dump all data and then download it a few hours | later. I mostly just use paid for services (GCP, Play books and | movies, sometimes Colab Pro), but Gmail is my backup email and I | like to download that occasionally. | | re: Amazon: I like to refresh my VPN IP address, and go to Amazon | in a private browser tab to avoid being "gamed" on item pricing. | I login once I have the price set. | MaxGanzII wrote: | I've been trying for over two years to get my data from Amazon. | | I eventually got to a point where Amazon provided a web-page, | which has no less than _sixty-two_ download links on, each of | which would have to be manually operated. | | It's properly tantamount to obstruction. | | After finally reaching this point, Support were arrogant and | high-handed - "We will not do any more than we have. We look | forward to seeing you on Amazon in the future." | | I still do not have my data. | | I tried to start the process off a second time, but it went | nowhere. I chased it, and then had some very disconnected and | confusing responsese from Support (email from some random guy in | Support who by the looks of it had been told to email me, but | neither he had been told what for, nor I that it would happen). | | I've not spent more time on it since then. | | I stopped using Amazon about two years ago, because I've come to | the view that the stories about how Amazon treats warehouse staff | are accurate. | | I want to get my personal data, so I can close the account. | | Amazon of course refuse point blank (in the usual, slimey, | support-talking-past-you way) to delete any personal data, so all | you can do is delete the account and hope in the end Amazon | expire the data. | bmn__ wrote: | > I eventually got to a point where Amazon provided a web-page, | which has no less than sixty-two download links on, each of | which would have to be manually operated. | | > I still do not have my data. | | > I want to get my personal data | | Is there a good reason why you don't take the three minutes to | click the 62 download links? | jaclaz wrote: | What I found "queer" (besides the tediousness/whining) was the: | | >It's not explained how Amazon acquires this third-party audience | data, but according to this dataset I apparently am a homeowner, | in possession of a luxury sedan and SUV, and in the 45 to 54 age | range. This was all news to me, as I am none of those things. | | This kind of data is seemingly what "circulates" about you and on | which advertising statistics and targeting are made. | | Should we believe that it is only a singular glitch or that most | of these data is simply wrong/made up? | salawat wrote: | Probably LexisNexus. Their sales offerings will promise | datasets offering information on political affiliation and | marital status of arbitrary addresses. | | Or info shared from partners/affiliates. People talk about you, | and most of it is BS, but you as the consumer should just | accept it so businesses can monetize their datasets! | | Ain't it great? | legitster wrote: | I run a part of the data request process at our company. This | article is an example where people expect anything technology | related to be magic. | | We have to go through EVERY tech stack we own and look for that | person's data. It's amazingly manual and tedious and takes about | 6 people about an hour per request. | | We're working to automate it, but needless to say we try not to | broadcast it too broadly. | | I hate that everyone jumps on any bad experience as a "dark | pattern" when there's plenty of incompetence to share the blame. | QuikAccount wrote: | I understand what you mean and I agree about everyone whining | that the "sky is falling" but in my opinion, you shouldn't | collect what you can't easily give me. | lelandfe wrote: | It's revealing how hard this stuff is when Google's Data | Liberation Front needed 4 years to release Google Takeout - | which I consider to be best-in-class for personal data access. | jsnell wrote: | It is a hard problem, but the GDPR went into effect 3 years | and 10 months ago. That date didn't come as a surprise, but | was known 6 years ago. Anything newer than that should have | taken data requests into account from the design stage. | Anything older than that has had ample time to adjust. More | than that 4 years you quote for Takeout! | blip54321 wrote: | I disagree. Google Takeout is a sham. It doesn't have all the | data they collect about you. It's almost adequate for data | portability, but not quite. It's useless for data | transparency. | | Google Docs keeps keystroke-level logs of everything you | type, for example. That's not in Takeout. Neither are things | needed to conduct a security audit (that's a paid service for | Workspace customers). Neither is a lot of advertising | profiling data. | alias_neo wrote: | > I hate that everyone jumps on any bad experience as a "dark | pattern" when there's plenty of incompetence to share the | blame. | | While I understand you; this is Amazon. It's laughable to | think, for an organisation with the technology and resources of | Amazon, that this is anything but laziness, "malicious | compliance" or a deliberate "fuck you". | | Having me forced to click over a hundred download buttons to | get the data I requested is not ok for a company Amazon's size | and is not because they couldn't spare the resources to have | someone write a few lines of code to archive those into a | single tar.gz/zip and provide one button to click, it's | deliberate. | dmitriid wrote: | > We have to go through EVERY tech stack we own and look for | that person's data. It's amazingly manual and tedious and takes | about 6 people about an hour per request. | | GDPR went into effect _5 years ago_. If 5 years later you still | haven 't automated this... | bstrawson wrote: | People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The author may | want to read the privacy policy[0] for the site they are | publishing their story on. They are collecting all sorts of data | that they don't need to. And IANAL but apparently your rights to | access the data they hold on you are restricted only to locations | where they legally have to allow it. | | [0] https://theintercept.com/privacy-policy/ | nicwolff wrote: | > which once again (for the sixth and, mercifully, final time) | helpfully reminded me that "You can access a lot of your data | instantly, as well as update your personal information, from Your | Account." | | It's a shared page template, man. No need to hyperventilate. | 7373737373 wrote: | I had the exact same experience. I wouldn't mind if they would be | sued for this. It's audacious, a dark pattern, user hostile, | lazy. | MaxGanzII wrote: | It's arrogant, high-handed and evil. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-27 23:00 UTC)