However, the support person should have been more explicit that the OT (original tweeterer ?) is sharing addresses and may want to hide that. The way support person's tweet was phrased is what gave the pitchfork people an opportunity. A perfect example of how not to communicate.
Unfortunately that also distracts from the intent of the OT's post.
i think its a good thing for support to (be told to) err on the side of caution with account information, though some nuance that you could "remove/blur/blackbar information" would be nice.
Probably most HN users know that, of course, if someone buys an Alexa and keeps it in their home, it is going to have a bunch of audio recordings of them. And all of the Whole Foods transactions will be logged as well. And even a silly amount info about how they use the Kindle.
But I don't think most Twitter users know.
I also enjoy that there is a tweet about how to request your data from Amazon, here: https://twitter.com/AlinaUtrata/status/1485196120997478404
Next I wonder if Amazon will badger Twitter to take down the tweet on the basis it has some PII (which I'm not even sure it does, but if it does, it is the users own information. And afaik you can't dox yourself.)
Imagine I found out the library kept a list of titles I borrowed! Or my bank account storing my transactions.
However, this lady seems incredibly smart, hosts a podcast (and newsletter) about many topics (inc. tech). I would personally have the opinion that she would be fully aware of how Alexa works and that Amazon would most likely be storing her data.
I know I shouldn't be blaming her in this instance, and I'm not, I'd just expect her to know better.
This is madness. How is the 'average user' supposed to go through and understand this data? The files inside are also probably a bunch of CSV or XML files as well.
It seems like a completely disingenuous (even nefarious) offer to the 'average user' to have a change to look at all the data these big companies have on them.
Also, machine learning can create shadow profiles for people, even those who don't have a loyalty account. (E.g., a purchase occurs every Friday around 5:30 and buys a specific beer and specific brats...).
This is all obvious stuff to me, but, also, people might not be aware that every interaction - touchpoint - on a big enterprise is recorded.
gently, my take on privacy is that, we will never be able to turn the clock back to 1970; we have to instead reconceptualize privacy in the age of pervasive sousviellance & surveillance.
address + person + timestamp = location history
I don't want to side with Amazon on this, but I genuinely believe there is nothing strange here: Amazon collects all that data, and under GDPR they have to provide all the data they have on your profile. Seems pretty standard. Google provides the same amount of data (or more) if you ask :)
Evidence for this theory: https://twitter.com/search?q=We%20encourage%20not%20includin...
> The Terrorist are ordering off Amazon. They stole my last parcel package, I did not tweet about it. My green light, don’t report it.
https://twitter.com/HeidiNarco/status/1485408221024210944?cx...
Sure, Amazon's response was probably just a standard text the support team has to use. But it can also be interpreted like "here's an arbitrary reason you should delete this tweet about our data collection, and look how easy it is!".
That's what you get when an anti-competitive megacorporation collecting data about everything including how many seconds users looked at a picture wants to look trustworthy.
>Google provides the same amount of data (or more) if you ask :)
Facebook too. And Apple and so on. Doesn't make it a good thing.
Anyways, yes, I stand corrected. Those ywo addresses are related to Whole Foods, not the user's location. My bad!
Does it, though? Where?
So I guess now they is just foolish?
