Over 250 million Americans use Amazon. Some users, I’m sure, are reading this article right now. If so, it may be worth asking whether it’s wise to keep using it. That’s because the world’s largest online marketplace is compiling a dossier on you.
The company built an automated system to analyze your late-night impulse buys and generate intimate, unasked-for judgments about your life. You thought you were purchasing paper towels and a toaster oven. Instead, as a new report shows, you were sitting for an unrequested and unannounced psychological evaluation conducted by a soulless server rack.
A few decades ago, a guy could walk into a general store in rural Ohio, buy a shovel, pay cash, and walk out with his reputation entirely intact. The shopkeeper knew he owned a shovel, nothing more. Today, a single click for back-pain cream triggers algorithmic assumptions. The system decides you have a bad posture, a failing spine, zero athletic ability, and perhaps a declining social life. You never filled out a questionnaire. You never gave permission for a corporate entity to play armchair psychologist. You simply wanted to sit comfortably at your desk, but the digital ledger registered your pain as a permanent personality trait.
Privacy used to mean locking the front door and pulling down the blinds in the evening. Those days, sacred in hindsight, are gone. Every book title, shoe size, vitamin bottle, and middle-of-the-night snack run helps paint a detailed portrait of your household.
A man might willingly hand over his mailing address and a credit card number to receive a package on his porch. That straightforward commercial transaction ends the second the box lands on the welcome mat, or at least it should. Giving a company permission to ship you coffee beans is completely different from letting that company decide you are a lonely, out-of-shape insomniac. The real danger lies in these uninvited, rather offensive inferences. You provided the payment details, but Amazon took the liberty of inventing a narrative about your character, habits, physical flaws, your identity.
These automated judgments sound absurd when they accuse an individual of having a pitiful posterior or no friends. It’s tempting to laugh at the idea of a tech corporation delivering such bizarrely specific insults. But the humor vanishes the moment that same level of scrutiny turns to your medical history, finances or religious beliefs. A system that can decide you have the social skills of a basement-bound recluse can just as easily decide you’re an insurance risk, a poor credit candidate, or a potential political liability.
Remember, we’re looking at a small window into a huge, hidden warehouse. Amazon allows users to see a tiny slice of their inferred profiles, but nobody should believe that this represents the entire file. Hidden menus and buried account settings hide the extent of what these servers calculate every minute of every day.
When a company collects thousands of distinct transactions over many years, it possesses the power to reconstruct a person’s daily life with terrifying accuracy. Finding out what else rests in those digital filing cabinets remains nearly impossible for citizens.
Living in a free country means having the right to look a powerful entity in the eye and say its conclusions are entirely wrong. An automated formula looks at a purchase of a baby crib and assumes a child lives in the house, ignoring the possibility of a gift for a sibling or a neighbor. The algorithm operates without context, converting simple, routine commerce into permanent labels. A citizen loses his basic standing when a private corporation gains the unchallengeable power to define his personal life based on a stream of shipping receipts.
We face an unprecedented information imbalance between the consumer and the corporations dominating modern life. You know the price of the item. You know the estimated delivery date and the return policy. The corporation knows your routine and your insecurities. It knows your household composition and your personal preferences. Liberty requires transparency, balance, and, most of all, basic respect for individual boundaries. A company should never maintain a more detailed file on your life than you are allowed to see, question, and, if you wish, erase. But Amazon does, and Americans should ask themselves if free two-day shipping is worth handing over the keys to their private lives.