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I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com'

by z0r 5d ago

I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.

bflesch 5d ago
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
- z0r 5d ago
  But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
  - deleted 5d ago
    [deleted]
  - bflesch 5d ago
    > Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it. They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data. Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages. In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
    - cmpxchg8b 5d ago
      It’s not Amazon’s place to police this at all.
    - z0r 5d ago
      I think it is very clear that the "deal" with Gmail is that they host your email and use the platform to sell you things based on the content of the email (and your Google account profile in general). I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, but I don't think Amazon is defending my best interests by stripping information from emails so that I (and thus Google) cannot see their contents. Of the two companies at play in this scenario I dislike Amazon more. I can understand why you might dislike Google more; certainly they have been working hard on similar walled garden tactics on every service and platform they control. However, in each specific such scenario I am going to come down against the company crippling their product and punishing their users, and in this case it is Amazon. Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.
rkagerer 5d ago
Agreed, that really sucks.

by z0r 5d ago

bflesch 5d ago

We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.

z0r 5d ago
But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
- deleted 5d ago
  [deleted]
- bflesch 5d ago
  > Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it. They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data. Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages. In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
  - cmpxchg8b 5d ago
    It’s not Amazon’s place to police this at all.
  - z0r 5d ago
    I think it is very clear that the "deal" with Gmail is that they host your email and use the platform to sell you things based on the content of the email (and your Google account profile in general). I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, but I don't think Amazon is defending my best interests by stripping information from emails so that I (and thus Google) cannot see their contents. Of the two companies at play in this scenario I dislike Amazon more. I can understand why you might dislike Google more; certainly they have been working hard on similar walled garden tactics on every service and platform they control. However, in each specific such scenario I am going to come down against the company crippling their product and punishing their users, and in this case it is Amazon. Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.

rkagerer 5d ago

Agreed, that really sucks.