Of the 350 million people living in America, more than 250 million use the world’s largest online marketplace. That marketplace is Amazon, and it has been keeping a file on each of them. A new report describes just how personal and damning Amazon’s dossiers can be.
The company builds highly complex customer profiles by analyzing your purchases. These profiles run the gamut, including inferences about customers’ ages, relationships, body types, clothing sizes, food preferences, and daily routines. For example, as Futurism noted, one customer who sought to identify what Amazon knew about her found that she reads Kindle books in the bathroom. Amazon was right. The question was how it knew. Another customer was described as having “no friends,” while a third, according to the Verge, found a comment suggesting her posterior was, shall we say, aesthetically unappealing.
Disclosure is the cost of doing business in 2026.
Decades ago, the average American could drive out to a general store and buy a hammer and nails. When all was said and done, all that fellow would have divulged was that he bought practical essentials with the cash he kept in his jeans. The fact that no one else knew any more about him than that was a happy byproduct of a system in which commerce and surveillance didn’t intersect the way they do now. Our grandfathers locked the door when they got home and drew the blinds. They knew that what happened in the house stayed in the house.
Those days are long gone.
When you purchase a bottle of vitamins, Amazon knows, or thinks it knows, what ails you. It sizes up your children by the books you buy them. Your Amazon account knows your shoe size. It knows what you were snacking on in the middle of the night last Tuesday, and it connects that with other purchases and extrapolates, building a picture of your life so intimate and complete that it amounts to a sort of digital twin, a simulacrum so adept at predicting your behavior that the company can nudge it in the directions of its choosing.
Some might suggest that this is nothing new. Companies have always tracked us. But what is new is how casually people agree to this arrangement. Yes, you provide Amazon with your credit or debit card number when you make a purchase. Of course. How else will you pay for that juicer you probably don’t need? Your street address, too, naturally. Someone has to plop it on your welcome mat. And that is fine; such disclosure is the cost of doing business in 2026, the price of admission to the modern marketplace. But Amazon goes much farther. Purchases of back-pain ointment can become evidence that you are slouchy, grumpy, and uncoordinated. Multiple orders of coffee beans might paint you as a lonely, possibly out-of-shape insomniac.
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Amazon is a monopoly, which means it wields a kind of power heretofore seen only in governments. It controls the flow of goods and services and the transmission of information. With this power comes responsibility, and by weaponizing such intimate data, Amazon can abuse it in the most irresponsible and unethical way.
Freedom used to mean having the power to act for yourself. Today, it must also mean being free from others’ judgments about you. We all have a basic, if implicit, right to control how much personal information others collect and how they use it. But to exercise that right, you must first know what they know about you. That means greater transparency, a fairer balance of information between companies and their customers, and a way to challenge institutions when they get things wrong. A woman purchasing coffee beans may not be an insomniac but instead live in a home with multiple people who drink multiple cups of coffee a day.
But Amazon, with its current harvesting and inference system, doesn’t care about nuance. A man purchasing "Mein Kampf" simply because he is interested in the evolution of one of the most evil historical figures ever to walk the face of the earth might find himself recast as a white supremacist with a penchant for goose-stepping. In the not-too-distant future, browsing alone could trigger pre-crime algorithms.
Thankfully, all is not lost. As Futurism reports, Amazon lets users review some of its guesses and questionable assumptions about them. To do so via desktop:
- Go to Account & Lists, then Account.
- Scroll down and select the option to “manage your information,” then either the profile option or the personalization option. In the Amazon app, you can find this feature by following this particular route: Profile icon > Account > Shopping preferences > About you.
- Check the other options in that section too, in particular around privacy settings and advertising preferences, to make sure Amazon isn’t collecting and using information you don’t want it to use.
This won’t stop all personal information collection, and it may not delete all such data, but it can limit the extent of that process.
Ultimately, each individual must decide how much info he is comfortable sharing with Amazon and whether the benefits justify the trade-off. In other words, is free two-day shipping really worth sacrificing your privacy and basic dignity?