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> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bo

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Wow, he's right. The item name no longer appears on emailed receipts I receive from Amazon as of about late 2019 or early 2020. I can't think of a plausible explanation for this change other than preventing Google from pilfering your detailed purchase history. Thank you Amazon, I guess.

skybrian 5y ago
Another possibility is that email is sometimes unencrypted, email clients vary in how secure they are, and some regulation says they have to care about this because privacy. But who knows, making stuff up like you and I did isn't evidence. At best it gives you an idea of the range of possibilities.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  There is precedent of weaponizing email data against the company sending the emails, though.[0] This definitely seems like a move that's in Amazon's best interest. I have not heard about regulations like what you're describing. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-firm-slice-unroll-me-backlash-uber.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Jabbles 5y ago
Cannot reproduce - my emails from Amazon have the subject "Your order of X" and contain a link to X.
- bityard 5y ago
  It must vary by customer, none of my emails about my Amazon orders EVER contain any information about the items ordered, they just have a status and the order number. I once talked to their customer service to ask how to stop getting the emails since they're basically entirely useless and they told me there's no way to do that.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Not only that; it seems even your chosen language has an impact. The mails from Amazon.de in German do not contain any information about ordered items. From the same Amazon.de, to the same mail address, but in Czech, they do.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      This sort of solution belongs in the article.
    - universa1 5y ago
      Hmm, must be customer specific then... my amazon.de mails contain the items, tracking number, etc... :-)
- bombcar 5y ago
  My order receipts have what I ordered but the shipment and delivery notifications no longer do.
  - Jabbles 5y ago
    I have: - Your order of X (confirmation) - Your order of X has been dispatched - Arriving today: X - Delivered: Order number N Only the last does not contain the product name X.
WillPostForFood 5y ago
I find it pretty annoying that the product info isn’t in the receipts, shipment notification, or delivery notification. A less charitable interpretation of Amazon’s motivation is that it forces you to click back to Amazon where they are trying to sell more to you.
robocat 5y ago
> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising? One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-privacy-how-to-delete.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google’s Purchase’s page said “Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it to choose which ads you see”; however I did just log into Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and couldn’t find that text now, so who knows if that is still true. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a second refutation from 2017 - “Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting”. Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a motivation of Amazon’s.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  You seem to be equating “mining” with “selling to third parties”, I don’t think it’s the common use (I understand it as “gathering data”). Also there’s many ways to exploit the purchase data without ever selling it outside the company, including using it in aggregate for ad targeting without exposing specifics to the ad buyer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rebeccaskinner 5y ago
Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things, including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you to search for the name of something you bought in the past to order it from a different retailer.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Seems incompatible. Making you log-in to advertise is a far less effective option than the ability to advertise products to you while you voluntarily use another service, i.e. your email. They could easily do the same adverts and quick order links from your email, but targeted adverts in your inbox is useful information to Google, maybe even better than purchase history since the recommendation work is already completed.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Once you're logged in, the credit card is ready to go.
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      And if your password is stored as most people's are then an email link is really no slower.
hooksfordays 5y ago
Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we were less and less able to provide actionable info on your Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had placed an order at Amazon. [1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1223471316 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...
- hooksfordays 5y ago
  Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020, negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started flooding in. People associated the name/design change with the degraded experience, when really the experience had already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The initial rebrand only changed mostly superficial things, like colours and the name!
  - tomcatfish 5y ago
    That's interesting and completely changes my views on Amazon's actions. I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in" action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my position.
- universa1 5y ago
  German Amazon still lists what was ordered in both order confirmation and shipping notification mails. It also lists the tracking number and the shipping company, even though they link to their own tracking overview... So looks like it is not yet globally at the same low standard, and might also be because of different laws.
nly 5y ago
I don't see this. I ordered something from Amazon today and a full description of the item I bought, including size and price, is in purchase confirmation email...
code_duck 5y ago
This also enables Amazon to claim you purchased a different item than you did, or charge a different price. The only way to obtain documentation of a purchase is to take a screenshot of every transaction. I bought some lightbulbs from Amazon recently. I am quite sure I purchased some 7-8 watt LED candle bulbs. I received a package of 50 watt incandescents, which was definitely not what I wanted. I went to my Amazon account and it showed I had purchased the incandescents. I looked at my email receipt, and all contained was is a list of links to Amazon, which led to their site, showing I had purchased the incandescents. The lack of text in the email meant I had no way to determine what I actually purchased and whether the mistake was on my end, Amazon's or the third party vendor.
- fjert 5y ago
  I had a very similar thing happen to me. I bought some AirPod Pros on sale and received normal AirPods and the Amazon order history indicated I ordered them when I know for a fact I had not. I was able to exchange them and all, but it was super frustrating.
- breakingcups 5y ago
  You probably unintentionally got caught in a review whitewashing scheme, where a well-rated product gets renamed and its specification and pictures updated to an entirely unrelated (or in your case, somewhat related) product so the seller doesn't have to start from 0 reputation.
  - Joeri 5y ago
    Isn’t that fraud? Like, literally the legal definition of fraud? Why doesn’t the government step in to put a stop to that?
    - cute_boi 5y ago
      This is like a petty case for government. They even make it difficult to report such case due to bureaucracy :(
    - 5y ago
dan-robertson 5y ago
Maybe this is a U.S. thing or I don’t understand what you mean by ‘receipt’ but in the U.K. I get an ‘order confirmation’ which contains the things I ordered as well as various delivery updates.
- guntars 5y ago
  That's exactly it, except the email is just "Thank you for buying something for some price" and, no, you can't unsubscribe.
bduerst 5y ago
Nah, Amazon just figured out they could get you to buy more by getting you to click back into the website. Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now. Someone at Amazon took dark-pattern customer engagement 101.
- justahuman74 5y ago
  Then why is gmail still free?
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Gmail is still ad subsidized, under the sponsor tab or whatever. You don't need to mine emails to show someone adverts to click on.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Google says "Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now." just like how cops says "We have investigated ourselves and found no haven't found any faults" Specious....
  - bduerst 5y ago
    The difference being one has deep pockets and would set a world record with a billion-person class action lawsuit, if they were lying.
Cd00d 5y ago
I don't think Gmail is the company that drove Amazon to this practice. Source: I have a data provider that scrapes your email when you use their 3rd party email app, and sells your purchase receipts downstream. Google has no reason to do this to you, but the industry as a whole is shady.
dereg 5y ago
If I recall correctly, there's less a concern about Google than there are of malicious third-party data harvesters that gain full access to users inboxes by offering their service under the guise of being an email client. Edison Mail, Slice, and Rakuten are among the many offenders.

skybrian 5y ago

Another possibility is that email is sometimes unencrypted, email clients vary in how secure they are, and some regulation says they have to care about this because privacy. But who knows, making stuff up like you and I did isn't evidence. At best it gives you an idea of the range of possibilities.

lelandfe 5y ago
There is precedent of weaponizing email data against the company sending the emails, though.[0] This definitely seems like a move that's in Amazon's best interest. I have not heard about regulations like what you're describing. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-firm-slice-unroll-me-backlash-uber.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Jabbles 5y ago

Cannot reproduce - my emails from Amazon have the subject "Your order of X" and contain a link to X.

bityard 5y ago
It must vary by customer, none of my emails about my Amazon orders EVER contain any information about the items ordered, they just have a status and the order number. I once talked to their customer service to ask how to stop getting the emails since they're basically entirely useless and they told me there's no way to do that.
- vetinari 5y ago
  Not only that; it seems even your chosen language has an impact. The mails from Amazon.de in German do not contain any information about ordered items. From the same Amazon.de, to the same mail address, but in Czech, they do.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    This sort of solution belongs in the article.
  - universa1 5y ago
    Hmm, must be customer specific then... my amazon.de mails contain the items, tracking number, etc... :-)
bombcar 5y ago
My order receipts have what I ordered but the shipment and delivery notifications no longer do.
- Jabbles 5y ago
  I have: - Your order of X (confirmation) - Your order of X has been dispatched - Arriving today: X - Delivered: Order number N Only the last does not contain the product name X.

WillPostForFood 5y ago

I find it pretty annoying that the product info isn’t in the receipts, shipment notification, or delivery notification. A less charitable interpretation of Amazon’s motivation is that it forces you to click back to Amazon where they are trying to sell more to you.

robocat 5y ago

> with Gmail, where you were so aggressive about mining receipt data from Amazon that when I get a receipt from Amazon now it doesn’t actually include what I bought Anyone have a factual source that confirms that gmail is mining receipt data for advertising? One refutation https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-privacy-how-to-delete.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-gmail-purchases-priv... said in 2019 that Google’s Purchase’s page said “Google won't sell the [Purchases] information or use it to choose which ads you see”; however I did just log into Google and looked at https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases and couldn’t find that text now, so who knows if that is still true. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067714 refers to a second refutation from 2017 - “Google Will No Longer Scan Gmail for Ad Targeting”. Edit: I did read an article talking about other companies scanning receipts to target advertising, so that could be a motivation of Amazon’s.

makeitdouble 5y ago
You seem to be equating “mining” with “selling to third parties”, I don’t think it’s the common use (I understand it as “gathering data”). Also there’s many ways to exploit the purchase data without ever selling it outside the company, including using it in aggregate for ad targeting without exposing specifics to the ad buyer.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rebeccaskinner 5y ago

Another plausible explanation is that omitting the items you bought means that you have to log back into Amazon and look at your purchase history to see what you ordered. That gives amazon several more touch points to get you to buy more things, including the "buy it again" button that they put on the page for particular items. It also makes it more difficult for you to search for the name of something you bought in the past to order it from a different retailer.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Seems incompatible. Making you log-in to advertise is a far less effective option than the ability to advertise products to you while you voluntarily use another service, i.e. your email. They could easily do the same adverts and quick order links from your email, but targeted adverts in your inbox is useful information to Google, maybe even better than purchase history since the recommendation work is already completed.
- danuker 5y ago
  Once you're logged in, the credit card is ready to go.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    And if your password is stored as most people's are then an email link is really no slower.

hooksfordays 5y ago

Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we were less and less able to provide actionable info on your Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had placed an order at Amazon. [1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1223471316 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...

hooksfordays 5y ago
Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020, negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started flooding in. People associated the name/design change with the degraded experience, when really the experience had already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The initial rebrand only changed mostly superficial things, like colours and the name!
- tomcatfish 5y ago
  That's interesting and completely changes my views on Amazon's actions. I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in" action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my position.
universa1 5y ago
German Amazon still lists what was ordered in both order confirmation and shipping notification mails. It also lists the tracking number and the shipping company, even though they link to their own tracking overview... So looks like it is not yet globally at the same low standard, and might also be because of different laws.

nly 5y ago

I don't see this. I ordered something from Amazon today and a full description of the item I bought, including size and price, is in purchase confirmation email...

code_duck 5y ago

This also enables Amazon to claim you purchased a different item than you did, or charge a different price. The only way to obtain documentation of a purchase is to take a screenshot of every transaction. I bought some lightbulbs from Amazon recently. I am quite sure I purchased some 7-8 watt LED candle bulbs. I received a package of 50 watt incandescents, which was definitely not what I wanted. I went to my Amazon account and it showed I had purchased the incandescents. I looked at my email receipt, and all contained was is a list of links to Amazon, which led to their site, showing I had purchased the incandescents. The lack of text in the email meant I had no way to determine what I actually purchased and whether the mistake was on my end, Amazon's or the third party vendor.

fjert 5y ago
I had a very similar thing happen to me. I bought some AirPod Pros on sale and received normal AirPods and the Amazon order history indicated I ordered them when I know for a fact I had not. I was able to exchange them and all, but it was super frustrating.
breakingcups 5y ago
You probably unintentionally got caught in a review whitewashing scheme, where a well-rated product gets renamed and its specification and pictures updated to an entirely unrelated (or in your case, somewhat related) product so the seller doesn't have to start from 0 reputation.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Isn’t that fraud? Like, literally the legal definition of fraud? Why doesn’t the government step in to put a stop to that?
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    This is like a petty case for government. They even make it difficult to report such case due to bureaucracy :(
  - 5y ago

dan-robertson 5y ago

Maybe this is a U.S. thing or I don’t understand what you mean by ‘receipt’ but in the U.K. I get an ‘order confirmation’ which contains the things I ordered as well as various delivery updates.

guntars 5y ago
That's exactly it, except the email is just "Thank you for buying something for some price" and, no, you can't unsubscribe.

bduerst 5y ago

Nah, Amazon just figured out they could get you to buy more by getting you to click back into the website. Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now. Someone at Amazon took dark-pattern customer engagement 101.

justahuman74 5y ago
Then why is gmail still free?
- bduerst 5y ago
  Gmail is still ad subsidized, under the sponsor tab or whatever. You don't need to mine emails to show someone adverts to click on.
cute_boi 5y ago
Google says "Gmail hasn't mined data for commercial purposes for half a decade now." just like how cops says "We have investigated ourselves and found no haven't found any faults" Specious....
- bduerst 5y ago
  The difference being one has deep pockets and would set a world record with a billion-person class action lawsuit, if they were lying.

Cd00d 5y ago

I don't think Gmail is the company that drove Amazon to this practice. Source: I have a data provider that scrapes your email when you use their 3rd party email app, and sells your purchase receipts downstream. Google has no reason to do this to you, but the industry as a whole is shady.

dereg 5y ago

If I recall correctly, there's less a concern about Google than there are of malicious third-party data harvesters that gain full access to users inboxes by offering their service under the guise of being an email client. Edison Mail, Slice, and Rakuten are among the many offenders.