There’s been a disturbing development in the surveillance capitalism space for me and other Amazon users: we can now find out exactly what the site thinks about us. The tax-agnostic shopping behemoth launched an “About You” function, which allows shoppers to see what assumptions and beliefs it has gathered from our purchases, in May, but last week things got interesting. Threads user Megan Montgomery found her “About You” page, and discovered Amazon thinks she “has flat buttocks”, prompting other shoppers to post the implacably devastating verdicts they uncovered: “husband has skinny legs”; “likes brunettes with muscles”; “cusses when scared”; “cannot keep real plants alive”; “too short to reach into a 40in-deep box” and “treats cats as biological children”. A TikTok user says hers includes “has a bad father”.
By their fruits shall ye know them, if by “fruits” you mean compression socks, shapewear, cat carriers and self-help guides. Obviously, this is bad, but it’s a well-deserved kind of bad – we’ve sacrificed privacy for convenience and this is the result. It’s also bleakly funny, so just as obviously, I was over there like a ferret up a trouser leg to find out what the stuff Amazon has delivered here over the years has caused it to deduce about my household. The results were disappointing. You don’t need a particularly sophisticated algorithm to deduce “likely lives in York”; “feeds wild birds consistently” (not in summer! I follow RSPB guidance!) and “cycles recreationally” (absolutely not, but I live with a multi-bike-owning MAMNILYBOROD – that’s “middle-aged man not in Lycra yet because of risk of divorce”).
