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

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

#191
post #28

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.

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?

Yes, it's doable in a one liner, but then you get a warning of your browser, then 100 windows asking to confirm to save the file, it still is terrible UX. And form my experience, most users are not aware of the dev console.

For others that may be interested by the data you get, it is quite detailed, I would recommend to use VisiData that make it really easy to navigate inside zip files and csv the files inside (most often a single file).

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

#192
post #190
post #28

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.

I'm not sure "an archive with all the data" is what you really want either. At some point you'll hit the limit of how much data does your filesystem allow in one file. Not sure if your browser is that good at resuming failed downloads too.

Google Takeout lets you split into multiple zips based on size. Amazon's take on this is just willfully evil.

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

#193

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 pr…

Google Takeout is "all your data", this Amazon download seems to actually be "all data about you". It seems you can't get the latter from Google.
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