Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

palant.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#31

Post by wheels »

NazakiAid wrote: post #6

I use Keepa basic and it has saved me a ton of money. I always just assumed it was scraping the prices from pages I visit, but I didn't know it would automatically fetch Amazon pages in the background. Might just sign out of Amazon, and use a separate browser to purchase from it. Either way, I have some thinking to do on if I should "keepa" it or not (sorry really bad joke). Maybe I should purposely turn a blind eye…

I use the Keepa website and never realized before this article that they even have browser plugins. On the website you can set up price alerts that go out via email or Telegram. That works well enough for me.

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#32

Post by danpalmer »

dewey wrote: post #27
voltagex_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get contracts to allow scraping? What kind of cost are we talking about?

Some companies want you to list their products on your page (usually with some kind of affiliate deal attached) but don't have a tech team to implement a feed or an API. In that case you end up in a situation where you have to scrape the data yourself with permission.

Pretty much exactly this. We're no affiliates as we do our own fulfilment, but essentially we partner with companies to offer their products on our site, and we take a margin from them.

We sometimes do this with feeds, but feeds aren't great for stock change latency which is important for us (thin stock levels on wide range of products, more out of stock issues). Scraping ensures we at least have the same stock latency that direct customers see, and we manage the risk on how frequently to scrape.

Most of these companies don't have in-house engineering capabilities. For Shopify based merchants we don't have to scrape, we use the Shopify API, but otherwise scraping is the only real solution.

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#33

Post by 45ure »

palant wrote: post #24
wilde wrote: post #20

> Unless of course you don’t consider the information collected here personal. I don’t. The author even goes out of their way to point out that these requests aren’t generated by the user and so there’s no latent interest information there. I agree that they should cover this behavior in the privacy policy explicitly, but there’s a tone of moral outrage in this piece that seems unearned.

Note : I am the author of this article. I’m really unsure how you would come to this conclusion. Even if you only read the summary at the beginning or only the conclusions section at the end, you should notice that Keepa is doing both. It will extract data from your Amazon visits (personal information) and do its own scraping (merely wasting your bandwidth if implemented correctly which I am unconvinced of).

Thanks for the article.

I use this extension (and the app) regularly, which activates as soon as I visit Amazon in a container tab. In addition to providing in-depth statistics, features like alerts via Telegram have helped me hunt down bargains. I have noticed the increase in network requests and bandwidth when the tab is active, using basic tracking via Resource Monitor (W10). However, I can easily block it via uMatrix/uBO, if required. In this case, it is a trade-off, which can be justified.

Also, Tracker Control (Android) for Keepa app reports blocking just two trackers Google Crashlytics and Google Firebase Analytics -- so it is not as bad other apps.

I have used CamelCamelCamel in the past, which was more egregious and aggressive in tracking users, but don't know how it fares today.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#34

Post by palant »

45ure wrote: post #33
palant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note : I am the author of this article. I’m really unsure how you would come to this conclusion. Even if you only read the summary at the beginning or only the conclusions section at the end, you should notice that Keepa is doing both. It will extract data from your Amazon visits (personal information) and do its own scraping (merely wasting your bandwidth if implemented correctly which I am unconvinced of).

Thanks for the article. I use this extension (and the app) regularly, which activates as soon as I visit Amazon in a container tab. In addition to providing in-depth statistics, features like alerts via Telegram have helped me hunt down bargains. I have noticed the increase in network requests and bandwidth when the tab is active, using basic tracking via Resource Monitor (W10). However, I can easily block it via uMa…

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. You cannot use other extensions to block requests happening on the extension’s background page. Whatever tracking and scraping is going on, you can probably disable part of it via extension’s settings but otherwise there is nothing you can do.

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#35

Post by palant »

wilde wrote: post #26
palant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note : I am the author of this article. I’m really unsure how you would come to this conclusion. Even if you only read the summary at the beginning or only the conclusions section at the end, you should notice that Keepa is doing both. It will extract data from your Amazon visits (personal information) and do its own scraping (merely wasting your bandwidth if implemented correctly which I am unconvinced of).

Thanks for engaging here. Maybe my reading comprehension is poor, but here’s the full quote that I was objecting to. It comes after a long pull quote where Keepa promises to not log the requests that do contain latent interest behavior: > This refers to some pieces of the Keepa functionality but it once again completely omits the data collection outlined here. It’s reassuring to know that they don’t log product ident…

“Data collection outlined here” refers to both mechanisms covered by the article. The first one collects information about the products you look at which clearly is personal information. The automated scraping in the background is less problematic from the privacy protection point of view, at least when it is used in the intended way.

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#36

Post by NazakiAid »

wheels wrote: post #31
NazakiAid wrote: post #6

I use Keepa basic and it has saved me a ton of money. I always just assumed it was scraping the prices from pages I visit, but I didn't know it would automatically fetch Amazon pages in the background. Might just sign out of Amazon, and use a separate browser to purchase from it. Either way, I have some thinking to do on if I should "keepa" it or not (sorry really bad joke). Maybe I should purposely turn a blind eye…

I use the Keepa website and never realized before this article that they even have browser plugins. On the website you can set up price alerts that go out via email or Telegram. That works well enough for me.

I would do that but it's very helpful to also see how often the price changes and goes on sale to know if I am getting "ripped off".

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#37

Post by wheels »

NazakiAid wrote: post #36
wheels wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the Keepa website and never realized before this article that they even have browser plugins. On the website you can set up price alerts that go out via email or Telegram. That works well enough for me.

I would do that but it's very helpful to also see how often the price changes and goes on sale to know if I am getting "ripped off".

There's a price graph on their website showing the price development over time.

Re: Data exfiltration in Keepa Price Tracker

#38

Post by rafaelm »

wheels wrote: post #31
NazakiAid wrote: post #6

I use Keepa basic and it has saved me a ton of money. I always just assumed it was scraping the prices from pages I visit, but I didn't know it would automatically fetch Amazon pages in the background. Might just sign out of Amazon, and use a separate browser to purchase from it. Either way, I have some thinking to do on if I should "keepa" it or not (sorry really bad joke). Maybe I should purposely turn a blind eye…

I use the Keepa website and never realized before this article that they even have browser plugins. On the website you can set up price alerts that go out via email or Telegram. That works well enough for me.

Same, I just set up alerts via Telegram and they popup on my phone and desktop client. Didn't know they had a browser extension.
Post reply on HN