Depending on how much you shop, watch and read with Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth may know more about you than any other company on earth.The big picture: Naturally, they know what you’ve browsed or bought on their main service. They also know what you’ve asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. They know even more thanks to their ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB and Audible.Details: As with Google or Facebook, what Amazon knows depend on how much you rely on its services.
That said, these days Amazon’s services are all around us. Here are some of the different types of information gathered by various Amazon services.Amazon.com: Everything you have bought, plus the things you have just put in your cart, or searched for, or added to a wish list, or just browsed on Amazon (and Amazon-owned sites like Zappos and Diapers.com). And they know all of your addresses and the names and addresses of anyone you’ve ever sent stuff to.Kindle (digital books) and Audible (audio books): All the books you’ve read, plus how far into the book you got. Amazon also knows which books you have browsed or sampled, and what passages you’ve highlighted in Kindle. Fire tablets: Amazon’s tablets run a custom version of Android, providing the company with lots of data since it, not Google, powers the browsing and app store on the devices. For search, users have a choice of Bing, Yahoo, Google or DuckDuckGo.Prime Video (streaming video): What you’ve watched, browsed and search for.Twitch (streaming game videos): What you’ve watched, browsed and searched for.Ring (smart doorbells and security gear): For customers with a paid recording plan, Amazon stores videos for 30 to 120 days depending on location, or until a customer manually deletes the video. Recordings for those who don’t subscribe to a plan are deleted automatically unless a customer posts a video to the publicly available Neighbors app.Eero (wi-fi routers): One of Amazon’s most recent acquisitions, Eero sells a mesh wi-fi router system. To do its job, like any home router, Eero’s device knows every Web site you go to, but the company says it doesn’t collect or store this information. (Eero detailed its practices in a blog post after the Amazon acquisition.)IMDB (movie and TV database): Although this is probably one of the lesser privacy concerns in Amazon world, your taste in movies can say a lot about you.Goodreads (book-centric social network): The focus may be on books, but Amazon is also building a social graph of the service’s bookworm members, in addition to getting more details on what sort of topics members are interested in.Whole Foods (grocery store):
Now that Amazon owns the upscale supermarket, if you shop here Amazon knows your grocery list, too. Whole Foods already offers deals to Prime members, linking the purchases of its best online customers with those buying offline.AlexaAmazon’s virtual assistant is worthy of its own section as its implications are so broad. Of course Alexa knows all the things
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