I’m not buying much from Amazon, but when I do, I do it on desktop from two separate browsers. One where I am not logged in and cookies get deleted after each session, to browse, find what I want and get the link, stripped down to the basics. (That’s also where affiliate codes go to die on my machine.) If/when I actually decide to buy, I use the other browser where I am logged in but almost all scripting is disabled. To make the purchase I copy in the stripped url. If it’s more than one thing I use Notepad to store the urls in between.
It got a little harder when Amazon moved most reviews behind the sign in, but not impossible, and all this only takes an extra minute or two on desktop. Thus Amazon has no idea why I buy what I buy, only what I have actually bought. This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.
This habit started accidentally a few years back but once I saw it really cut back on all that Amazon fuckery I never went back to shopping logged in. I haven’t seen the AI tool yet, but I imagine I can probably remove it from my sight with either NoScript or uBlock Origin if I do.
It’s that, and thank you for adding that clarification, but it’s also about breaking affiliate links unless I specifically want to use one, and about breaking linked tracking: big data titans like Amazon are all selling our data to each other. If Amazon has no idea why I bought something, that’s one less piece of my data they can sell off, one less piece of data that can be used to infer my political leanings or my health situation to better manipulate me, etc. Though to be clear, I’m pretty sure the Karl Marx and Che Guevara t-shirts and Preparation H I bought for jury duty took care of much of the latter.
The rest I already stated:
This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.
I’m not buying much from Amazon, but when I do, I do it on desktop from two separate browsers. One where I am not logged in and cookies get deleted after each session, to browse, find what I want and get the link, stripped down to the basics. (That’s also where affiliate codes go to die on my machine.) If/when I actually decide to buy, I use the other browser where I am logged in but almost all scripting is disabled. To make the purchase I copy in the stripped url. If it’s more than one thing I use Notepad to store the urls in between.
It got a little harder when Amazon moved most reviews behind the sign in, but not impossible, and all this only takes an extra minute or two on desktop. Thus Amazon has no idea why I buy what I buy, only what I have actually bought. This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.
This habit started accidentally a few years back but once I saw it really cut back on all that Amazon fuckery I never went back to shopping logged in. I haven’t seen the AI tool yet, but I imagine I can probably remove it from my sight with either NoScript or uBlock Origin if I do.
You’re still buying the product under your account though… I’m struggling to understand the point of doing all of this
If I understand this might be to limit being influenced into buying something by the algorithm?
It’s that, and thank you for adding that clarification, but it’s also about breaking affiliate links unless I specifically want to use one, and about breaking linked tracking: big data titans like Amazon are all selling our data to each other. If Amazon has no idea why I bought something, that’s one less piece of my data they can sell off, one less piece of data that can be used to infer my political leanings or my health situation to better manipulate me, etc. Though to be clear, I’m pretty sure the Karl Marx and Che Guevara t-shirts and Preparation H I bought for jury duty took care of much of the latter.
The rest I already stated: