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> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you
by oefrha 6y ago
> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission.
Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way.
To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
- artembugara 6y agoI think it's simply because you do forward someone on a website. Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good deal. So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
- oefrha 6y agoI made it very clear that I have no problem with the commission paid: > To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff. The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a commission without that disclosure.
- artembugara 6y agoAh damn. I somehow misread your initial message. My bad.
- joekrill 6y agoYou can't match up the product with an actual user or person in any way.
- inetknght 6y agoOh, no definitely not. Nope. There's no way that a company can see that you've purchased Some Things within the past 24 hours and definitely can't correlate those purchases with receipts. Nope that's not a thing. Definitely not. No way at all. Especially since companies aren't owned by parent companies. That would totally be impossible. /s
- jordansmith 6y agoCorrect. As the affiliate blog you see nothing involving receipts or personal info for purchasers. It’s just a jumble of all your referral purchases
- egfx 6y agoUnrelated but on Amazon is it possible to get order details if you have an order ID? You used to be able to scrape email for details but now you just get the ID itself.
- oefrha 6y agoCreate a web page of various recommendations, send it to a specific friend whose household regularly makes purchases on Amazon. Unsuspecting friend clicks on affiliate link, now you know all things they buy in the next 24 hours. Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and click frequency is low.
- KMnO4 6y agoI think seeing all the random items is collateral damage. It can possibly be fixed (only show purchases in the category that you referred?). As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers. Or if you saw that they ended up purchasing essential oils, perhaps you’d want to write a post about using oil diffusers to fall asleep. The affiliate link tracking is supposed to give you a better picture of your audience. Usually it works, but getting 50M views from every source on the internet is obviously a case where there’s no common “audience”.
- SamBam 6y agoNo one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to make money off of this. I think the question was whether it was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't realize that the blog owner can now track their buying habits.
- LordAtlas 6y agoOnly in the aggregate. The site owner doesn't know who purchased what. Only Amazon (obviously) knows. The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while 24 people bought book Y.
- SamBam 6y agoAnonymous data can easily become identifiable when it's small enough, as GP was saying. If someone runs a tiny blog that they attempt to monetize with affiliate links, and one of their only readers at the moment is their mother, I don't think they'd be happy seeing that one of their readers purchased a sex toy.
- Breza 6y agoThis is exactly the right approach. Anything specific enough can be traced back to an individual.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Jorge1o1 6y agoHeh, if you think that's bad... there's a certain popular "#1 Money Saving Hack", coupon-clipping browser extension (wink wink) that sees everything you buy on practically every major e-commerce site even when you didn't use one of their coupon codes. And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD. Really makes you think.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD. I guess selling the whole company owning the data isn't technically selling data to third parties...
- skeeter2020 6y agoCheck out any privacy policy that says they will never share or sell your data; the two boilerplate exceptions are law enforcement and transfering ownership of the parent entity. Two pretty big loopholes.
- woofcat 6y agoUhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts? Law enforcement.. What do you want them to do? Turn down a legal court order and say "naaa"?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> Uhh those seem like two really small loopholes. Buying the whole company makes sense. What is the alternative, the purchasing company has to accept that they'll purge all user accounts? Why not? The alternative is to allow a business model, in which you start a company with the sole purpose of vacuuming up data and delivering it to highest bidder by getting acquired.
- TheSisko 6y agoI run sites using Amazon's Associates affiliate program. I also track all outbound clicks from me site. Luckily, Amazon scrubs any identifying info from their affiliate reports. So say I post an affiliate link to a book and then look in Google Analytics to see 50 readers clicked the link. The next day, I can log into Amazon's report and see I had 50 clicks and 30 sales of the book along with an addition sale of 40 toys, 10 movies, and 3 dildos. However, I can't actually see which of my 50 readers bought what, if anything. Those 3 dildo purchases are completely anonymized, along with everything else. However, being told I also sold 40 toys really helps me because it lets me know I should probably start writing more about toys since that's what my readers are buying. I'm also limited to 200 unique Amazon "tags", so I can't assign a unique tag to each of my readers to track them individually.