Amazon's 'About You' section is quietly roasting users, and people love it

Amid mounting privacy concerns, the big tech companies have been trying to increase the semblance of transparency around how they profile us while reframing it as something that helps us as much as them. An unusually explicit example is the new About You section on Amazon.

Little known until a few days ago, this feature buried in customers' account settings reveals some of the information the online retail giant thinks it's gleaned from your activity. This can vary from mundane records about preferences to surprisingly specific and descriptive observations about customers' habits, interests, lifestyles and buttocks.

Amazon introduced About You in May, but the recent Threads post above is largely responsible for bringing it to public attention in recent days. The section lists assumptions that Amazon's AI has formed based on customers' purchasing history, reviews, wishlists and conversations with Alexa (the OP above later concluded that the comment on her physique may have been deduced from her purchase of some “butt scrunch leggings”).

According to Amazon, the assumptions listed can influence the ads and product recommendations that it shows the user. You can edit or remove details that are wrong or that you don't want to be used for recommendations, and you can also import data from other AI bots to help Amazon build up a more detailed profile for you, should you be inclined to do that.

Discovery of the feature has triggered a wave of other Amazon users to check their About You sections and post screenshots of them to social media. In some cases, people have been Amazon's profiling to be eerily accurate, while others have found assumptions that were wildly off the mark.

We know by now that most tech companies profile us. What's surprised people is that Amazon's now letting us read the notes without having to make a freedom of information request. Google and Meta allow users to edit their ad preferences, but they use fairly broad categories. Amazon's go much more granular. It thinks it knows whether you "engage in serious coffee brewing", whether you care for a cat and whether you have "tall books".

While some people are saying they find this algorithmic profiling sinister, most seem to be amused. Perhaps we've become desensitised to data collection amid the normalisation of AI, or maybe Amazon's made a smart move, gaining trust by revealing some of the logic behind its algorithms.

But is Amazon showing us what it knows about us, or just what it wants us to know it knows? The company doesn't claim that the About You page represents all the data associated with an account, but rather a way to view and edit details used to personalise shopping recommendations. It's potentially only a carefully curated view of a small subset of the data it has on us.