161–170 of 193 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> 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 (née 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Um, they are a charity?
Ah they are, wonder about the US version
The tax deductibility for us tax residents is a working major incentive
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…
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?
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 part…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 :)
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.