![]() ![]() Last year, Amazon was hit with a $886.6m (£636m) fine for processing personal data in violation of EU data protection rules, which it is appealing against. Like its data-grabbing counterparts Google and Facebook, Amazon’s practices have come under the scrutiny of regulators. ![]() Those who have requested their data from Amazon are astonished by the vast amounts of information they are sent, including audio files from each time they speak to the company’s voice assistant, Alexa. Not everyone is happy about this level of surveillance. The firm’s software is so accomplished at prediction that third parties can hire its algorithms as a service called Amazon Forecast. The more Amazon and services you use – whether it’s the shopping app, the Kindle e-reader, the Ring doorbell, Echo smart speaker or the Prime streaming service – the more their algorithms can infer what kind of person you are and what you are most likely to buy next. The 200 million users who are Amazon Prime members are not only the corporation’s most valuable customers but also their richest source of user data. Continuous analysis of customer data determines, among other things, prices, suggested purchases and what profitable own-label products Amazon chooses to produce. From selling books out of Jeff Bezos’s garage to a global conglomerate with a yearly revenue topping $400bn (£290bn), much of the monstrous growth of Amazon has been fuelled by its customers’ data. ![]()
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