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Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

theintercept.com

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Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#61

Post by Nextgrid »

Sujan wrote: post #25
jen20 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#62

Post by kerng »

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#63

Post by jjulius »

naoqj wrote: post #60
jjulius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What data does Amazon have that you haven't given them?

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#64

Post by plandis »

alex_young wrote: post #47
whoknew1122 wrote: post #19

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 sec…

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.

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#65

Post by naoqj »

jjulius wrote: post #63
naoqj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data does Amazon have that you haven't given them?

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.

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?

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#66

Post by karlicoss »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #55
gorgoiler wrote: post #35

HN probably aren't required to let me download my data, but it sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?

I'm sure it does as many third party clients offer features where you can read back your own posts etc.

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

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#67

Post by gdulli »

gorgoiler wrote: post #35

HN probably aren't required to let me download my data, but it sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#68

Post by kerng »

naoqj wrote: post #60
jjulius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What data does Amazon have that you haven't given them?

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.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#70

Post by jjulius »

naoqj wrote: post #65
jjulius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.
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