I had the exact same experience. I wouldn't mind if they would be sued for this. It's audacious, a dark pattern, user hostile, lazy.
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Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
81–90 of 193 posts
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#82The multiple download buttons is not a dark pattern to prevent you from downloading your data, it’s just bad UX, it’s a feature you add to check a legal box and it doesn’t get priority for usability. Probably someone just shrugged, this is good enough and moved on. They should definitely give you it all in one zip file but “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a developer rushing to get som…
> it’s just bad UX
"Bad" I would say means you can still achieve your task.
I was presented with over sixty download links, and not being an idiot or someone to be taken for a ride, I refused to go along with it, and that means the UI is not bad but failed.
What's more, it OBVIOUSLY failed.
There's no way a single person at Amazon could have genuinely sat there and thought, "yes, this, THIS is it, THIS is the right way to make this page", not, that is, if their goal was the user actually getting hold of their data.
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#83HN probably aren't required to let me download my data, but it sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?
You can do it if you know how to use an API. See the 'API' link at the bottom of the page.
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#84The article would be stronger if it didn't overreact and exaggerate, but then again I do appreciate the sarcasm. The 74 zip files are the most egregious part of it though. You can't zip those mofos into one file? It's spiteful somehow, like you asked for water and Amazon said "Here you go" and threw it in your face.
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're giving the argument too much credit. It's more akin to a large restaurant arguing that small restaurants could be put out of business by health inspections, so maybe we should hold off on the idea. Rather, keeping a clean kitchen is something they all should be doing anyway from the get go. Any pain for Amazon in Amazon's process is entirely Amazon's fault. If systems are built with the requirement of letting…
> If systems are built with the requirement of letting users export their data, then the additional effort to do so is trivial. It’s unreasonable, IMO, to think that companies should have had the foresight to see legislation that would happen two decades after the company had already existed and as a result build a system for retrieving user data that has no profit generating potential. GDPR is good because prior to…
Europeans have valued privacy and data protection for quite a while now culturally. The ePrivacy Directive is from 2002 (derisively referred to as the "cookie law"). And GDPR had a multi-year grace period. It's simply a result of companies ignoring building these kind of functionality for far too long.
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#86I did this myself a month ago or so. In addition to the process and the multiple downloads, I was very fascinated to discover that many reports were delivered as PDF. Why would that be, if not to make it more difficult to access?
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#87I 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.
Here's a picture of the UI for the download, with 123 different "Download" buttons. https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1503848290193862658
I did an Amazon download too, after Amazon's subsidiary Goodreads lost all my data of 9 years. I'm grateful for how the GDPR and the CCPA mandate that companies provide data downloads. Amazon is clearly doing the bare minimum to comply. Other companies do more; Twitter's data download comes with a fully working offline Javascript app for reading and searching your tweets!
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> each and every point in an article just feels "fabricated" or over the top. What I thought were valid points from the article: - Unclear data: "cryptic strings of numbers like '26,444,740,832,600,000” for various search queries." This is easily the worst offender IMO. - A wait time of 19 days - Separating the download into 74 buttons
Yup. I agree. The wait time doesn't make sense. They should be able to spin up extra servers from the spot market in seconds. Even if they're using Glacier, that should only be a few hours. I wonder if they execute the 74 data queries in serial to drag it out. And the multiple downloads is just bogus. That being said, I agree with the general point that the article is a bit overly dramatic. Amazon does a pretty good…
I helped build a system for privacy compliance at a large non-faang tech company. Honestly 19 days seems crazy but this is what we dealt with:
It’s 2018 and you have to bolt this mass export/delete on every stateful service in your company. Many of these are “critical” services that are not actively worked on and have a very limited maintenance budget. That is, some team with a lot of existing responsibilities absorbed it along the way and they have no bandwidth for it.
So in some cases their mechanisms for retrieval/deletion were pretty egregious and so we agreed on a rate limit and we would queue these requests up and handle all of the paperwork. You get 30 days to comply and if you need another 30 all you have to do is send an update within the first 30.
So, quite possibly, they have a rate limit and a queue on at least a handful of backend services and it truly truly does not matter as long as the queue is under 60 days.
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#89What 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 targeting are made.
Should we believe that it is only a singular glitch or that most of these data is simply wrong/made up?
Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium
#90HN probably aren't required to let me download my data, but it sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?
Actually, that's a question; the GDPR (Europe) and the CCPA (California) both require data download options. I don't know if Hacker News is a business that qualifies for this regulation though.