[HN Gopher] Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of co...
___________________________________________________________________
Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and
tedium
Author : Ansil849
Score : 311 points
Date : 2022-03-27 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theintercept.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theintercept.com)
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Clicking on the author's byline, it says the author is a
| 'security researcher focusing on privacy issues revolving around
| source protection, counter-forensics, and privacy assurance.' I
| would assume, therefore, the author would have at least passing
| knowledge of security and web applications.
|
| > Amazon at this point makes some intonations about how this
| email verification step is necessary because your privacy and
| security are the company's top priority, though considering that
| when your data is available you'll need to check your email
| anyway, it's not clear how checking your email twice adds any
| security.
|
| People can argue about whether email should be used for
| authentication purposes. But what is the alternate model
| suggested? From the formulation of the complaint, the author
| seems to suggest that it'd be better if Amazon did not decouple
| authentication and payload delivery.
|
| Sending the payload (in this case, a load of personal data) to an
| email address without first checking whether the requestor is in
| control of the address is a horrendously terrible idea. I'm
| starting to wonder about the author's security chops.
|
| > Though Amazon says that it will "provide your information to
| you as soon as we can," "soon" is apparently meant to be
| interpreted on a monthly time scale, as the page further states
| that "usually, this should not take more than a month." Though of
| course, "in exceptional cases, for example if a request is more
| complex or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it
| might take longer." This protracted time frame forms an
| intriguing juxtaposition to the otherwise universal emphasis on
| speed that facilitates shopping on Amazon.
|
| It's much easier to put information into various databases than
| it is to determine what databases contain information about a
| particular user, and present that data to the user in a secure,
| auditable manner.
|
| For example, you have to make sure that the user gets all the
| information they asked for (which means you have to determine
| whether the information exists, and if it doesn't you have to log
| the nonexistance of the data, lest you be audited). And you need
| to make sure user doesn't get information about someone else
| (which has happened in the past).
|
| Distributed systems are hard. It takes time to determine where
| all possible information could live. And you have to make sure
| you're providing the correct information. And do this flawlessly,
| every single time lest you open yourself up to bad press and
| potential fines. This all takes time in systems as large and
| distributed as Amazon.
|
| ---
|
| If the author is as knowledgeable in the security space as their
| byline suggests, I'm left to think that their incurious write-up
| is just trying to throw red meat at the 'We hate anything
| associated with Amazon' crowd.
|
| For what it's worth, my team at AWS processes GDPR requests
| within 3-or-so business days. But we can only do that because
| there is a single data warehouse for our product/service.
| alex_young wrote:
| Perhaps all of this would be a lot easier if you actually built
| some simple automation to process requests. What could possibly
| take 3 days to process? The only plausible reason is that
| you're wasting developers time on what really belongs in one of
| the myriad tools AWS itself provides for such tasks.
| plandis wrote:
| There's nothing that's simple when you're dealing with 10s of
| thousands of different datasets across many different
| internal team and service boundaries with their own security
| setup depending on the data that's being stored.
|
| The cost of automating and properly securing it (since
| "gather all customer data into one place" is generally not
| great as it's a single point of failure from a security
| perspective). All of that isn't really worth it to spend the
| effort automating if the total number of requests for data is
| not that high.
| alex_young wrote:
| My reply was to one person presumably on a pizza team at
| AWS. Surely they would realize some savings from automating
| their own retrieval requests.
|
| As others have pointed out aggregating all of the different
| reports into one download is a trivial task itself suited
| well for automation.
| [deleted]
| jsnell wrote:
| > Distributed systems are hard. It takes time to determine
| where all possible information could live. And you have to make
| sure you're providing the correct information. And do this
| flawlessly, every single time lest you open yourself up to bad
| press and potential fines. This all takes time in systems as
| large and distributed as Amazon.
|
| This implies that Amazon is serving GDPR data requests
| manually, rather than the whole process being automated. Surely
| that can't be true?
|
| I agree that identifying where data can be stored, and
| extracting it correctly, is a difficult problem. But that
| problem is identical for every user, and it should only need to
| be solved once. You aren't determining from scratch which
| databases contain user data on every request, right? Nor are
| you re-defining your export schema for each user, or re-
| implementing the identity authentication, or deciding which
| pieces of data don't need to be in the data export for some
| legal reason, or any of these other systematic difficulties.
|
| And if this automated, why suggest that the difficulty applies
| to serving each individual data access request rather than just
| to defining and implemeting a repeatable process?
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| To create a script/bot/application/whatever that can access
| all potential data, you have to give something read
| privileges to possibly hundreds of backend systems and
| products. This is horrendously bad idea security wise. If
| that service account gets compromised (either from an
| external or internal threat), you have a single account that
| has access to everything Amazon stores. This is bad for the
| company and bad for its customers.
|
| There necessarily have to be multiple workflows to maintain
| the data segregation necessary to protect data at the scale
| we're talking with Amazon.
|
| And assuming you could securely create this automated
| workflow, you'd still need a person manually verifying the
| end result to ensure that all the data scraped is in fact
| owned by the person who made the request. Within the past
| couple of years, there was a news story where someone got a
| different person's Alexa data after asking Amazon for their
| own data. That can't happen again.
| jsnell wrote:
| Sorry, I don't buy any of this.
|
| Automating the process doesn't need to imply that there's a
| single service with direct access to all of the data. Just
| from a basic software engineering perspective, it makes a
| ton of sense each product's data export to be a separate
| service owned by the product team, so no disagreements
| there. But by talking about how hard it is to figure out
| what data you have stored and export it correctly, you were
| implying that you had no such per-product service either,
| and each export is an artisanal custom job.
|
| The question of safeguards is interesting. I don't really
| see how having a human in the loop is adding any real
| security: a computer is going to be far better at deciding
| whether the request is valid or not. As an operator, being
| assigned a ticket to do an export of account 123456, what
| are you going to do other than do that export? A computer,
| on the other hand, can actually verify whether the request
| is actually authorized. That can be done in a way where a
| compromise of your central data export service account
| can't be used to fake the authorization.
|
| (A quick design sketch for one option: each account has a
| public key encryption keypair, managed by the identity
| system. When the central data export service requests an
| email verification, that is done via asking the identity
| system to sign a ticket. The identity system triggers a
| flow that asks the user to validate the request, and as
| part of the flow informs them of just what operation they
| are validating. User approval of the request signs the
| ticket with their private key. This ticket is sent to each
| data export service, which checks that the user id they're
| exporting has signed the ticket, and that the ticket
| contents match the request: i.e. same userid, operating is
| a data export, the data export covers this service. You
| will need to trust your identity system to not be
| compromised, but if it is, you're completely screwed
| anyway.)
|
| > And assuming you could securely create this automated
| workflow, you'd still need a person manually verifying the
| end result to ensure that all the data scraped is in fact
| owned by the person who made the request. Within the past
| couple of years, there was a news story where someone got a
| different person's Alexa data after asking Amazon for their
| own data. That can't happen again.
|
| The odds of a human doing a good job of this kind of
| validation are basically zero. Either they are following a
| checklist that a computer could execute more reliably, or
| they are just randomly poking at some 1 GB data dump trying
| to find the needle in the haystack.
| alex_young wrote:
| The automation would be a bigger risk than granting humans
| carte blanche access to customer data? That seems like an
| odd security conclusion.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| GDPR requests are handled, at least in part, manually. I have
| direct knowledge of how GDPR is handled within the
| product/service I support. And yes, it's manual.
| jsnell wrote:
| Thanks! That's my mind blown, then :) I can believe that
| the volume is low enough that manual work is acceptable,
| but even then I'd have thought that you'd want things
| entirely automated to eliminate the chance of human error.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| I'm not sure how low in volume the requests are. It's
| really hard to automate because you have to gather data
| from many internal teams and products, and the data is
| intentionally siloed to enhance customer privacy and data
| security.
|
| Manual work isn't the best way to handle it, but the
| costs of automating (in terms of security, intricacy
| regarding different storage systems, etc.) is too high to
| really automate it on a grand scale.
|
| Where I work, which is low traffic generally, we process
| around 10 requests or so a week (from what I've seen).
| Weryj wrote:
| What I'm surprised we aren't talking about is the encrypted blobs
| that Facebook provide when you download your data. With no
| instructions on how to decrypt to view your actual data.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Given Amazon's obsession with speed and eliminating friction to
| foster faster consumerism, the dawdling data solicitation process
| seems like it just might be intentional, designed to dissuade
| requests.
|
| > It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data
| request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5
| days to process a data request, as per the company's California
| Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020. There was no option for
| expedited Amazon Prime data delivery and no button equivalent to
| an instantaneous Buy Now (nee 1-Click) option when selecting my
| data.
|
| When you use Amazon services, I don't think there is a single,
| global database of all your data. Amazon has many different
| offerings (prime video, alexa, music, photos, books) often with
| many individual organizations and sets of teams within those
| organizations. Each customer-facing feature is supported by some
| N number of services, which collect and store data in different
| systems. These can be modern day systems built from the ground up
| with "privacy data reporting" as a first class feature, or they
| could legacy systems that were built any time before GDPR and
| other compliance laws came online.
|
| Some of these systems are write optimized as opposed to being
| read optimized. Others aren't even backed by a relational or
| NoSQL database. Instead, they may contain your data in some
| format that you cannot quickly query in constant time.
|
| It makes little sense for Amazon or any other company to invest
| hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to stand up entire
| organizations to migrate off these systems - simply because a
| median 1.5 day turnaround time is too high or so that Nikita
| Mazurov doesn't have to wait 19 days. Presumably that 19 days is
| closer to their 80th percentile or 90th percentile turn around
| time. Under the GDPR legislation, a Google search shows that the
| maximum turn around time under the law is about ~1 month.
|
| Any single system that has to integrate with practically
| EVERYTHING else in your entire company is going to be complex, no
| matter how much you try to simplify it. Your data may be stored
| in some format that's meaningful if it's given to you as is.
|
| Or that data may be stored containing proprietary information. Or
| it could contain implementation details. For instance, I've built
| systems where we stored "magic numbers" in place of string into a
| database, mainly to save on storage costs. I probably wouldn't
| want to return those magic numbers to a customer, because it
| would be meaningless.
|
| What I'm getting at is to even return one record from one
| specific service isn't necessarily just a SELECT query (assuming
| the data is stored in a relational db to being with).
|
| This article is full of outright negativity, trying to fuel
| outrage and assuming everything on Amazon's side is malice,
| incompetence, or some combination of both. I couldn't but help
| and look up the author's page on The Intercept:
|
| > Nikita Mazurov is a security researcher focusing on privacy
| issues revolving around source protection, counter-forensics, and
| privacy assurance.
|
| I don't use such strong language on HN, but here's my own thesis:
| This is an egregiously padded resume. Best case, it describes a
| university student/researcher who has never actually solved any
| real world problem. It's a combination of that fact and the fact
| that this article was deliberately written in a way to generate
| clicks by manufacturing outrage.
| Sujan wrote:
| It's not very often that each and every point in an article just
| feels "fabricated" or over the top.
|
| It starts with finding the page: Amazon -> Customer Service ->
| Search for "personal data" -> Search result #1 is "Request Your
| Personal Information" which nicely explains what to do and links
| directly to that page.
|
| The need to verify or activate a data request via clicking a
| link? Of course required so some third party can not just request
| your data to your inbox (and process it along the way) without
| you actually wanting to do that.
|
| All the mentions that most of the data is available in your
| Amazon account? Well, what many people are looking for (order
| history etc) is and even nicely formatted, searchable and cross
| linked to make it much more convenient.
|
| Clicking "Remove address" only removes it from the list of
| addresses? Of course, addresses you ordered to in the past can
| not be deleted as they have to legally be stored together with
| other order information.
|
| And the list goes on and on.
|
| I get that it is scary that a big company keeps all the data you
| gave to them. And it is also unfortunate for you that it is not
| their business goal to make it instant and pretty for you to look
| at all the data. But there is no reason for them to do that.
|
| If you don't want Amazon to have your data, don't user Amazon.
| When you use Amazon, the way you can get a lot of data from them
| is actually pretty good (also compared to other companies which
| pretent search history does not exist and so on).
|
| (And bye to some Hacker News points. This will get nicely
| downvoted I suspect.)
| [deleted]
| jen20 wrote:
| > But there is no reason for them to do that.
|
| If that is not their business goal, perhaps the GDPR needs to
| be strengthened and strongly enforced until it is.
| Sujan wrote:
| That is certainly a political decision that can be made, I
| agree and would actually be happy about that.
|
| If that happens, I am sure Amazon will invest the time and
| money to comply with that. At the same time it will put many
| smaller business out of business though, as they do not have
| the resources to do that. Even the current state of having to
| fulfill data requests is quite a problem for mayn of them.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I am getting quite tired of the "small businesses" argument
| about the GDPR. It's starting to become the "think of the
| children" equivalent but for data protection.
|
| Would you also be against food safety or physical product
| regulations (ban of leaded solder or other toxic
| chemicals)? After all, those can and do affect small
| restaurants and other businesses as well.
| Sujan wrote:
| I don't think comparing food safetey or toxic chemicals
| that hurt your health to the design, usability and
| accessibility of a data export is very valid. The parent
| argument was not about not having to export data at all.
| It was about how well designed it was.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The "small businesses" argument is brought up in every
| discussion of the GDPR including much worse
| transgressions than merely bad UX in the data export
| process. I was not exclusively referring to this
| particular instance.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| In general, no! But if someone proposed that all
| restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random
| samples of their food to check for spoilage and cross-
| contamination, I would have very similar questions about
| where the taco shack down the street is supposed to find
| an affordable chemical lab. Making it "instant and pretty
| for you to look at all the data" is a large, expensive
| endeavor and I don't see why it's necessary to achieve
| the regulatory goals here.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > But if someone proposed that all restaurants should
| perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food
|
| To be fair, people propose things all the time. It only
| becomes law when enough people agree that it is needed.
| That process isn't always perfect but in general it
| works.
|
| The reason we don't have a "General Food Safety
| Regulation" is that the current situation is good enough,
| either because the existing regulations are sufficient or
| that the industry can self-regulate (as it's usually bad
| for business to poison your customers). As a result, in
| most Western countries, you can be confident that any
| business that sells food will not poison you.
|
| If we suddenly had a food poisoning epidemic because all
| vendors were unscrupulous and selling spoiled food, I
| would totally be in favour of stronger regulations even
| if it means small taco shacks can't compete. Having to go
| to a farther/more expensive place that _can_ afford such
| checks is a price I (and I suspect most other people) am
| willing to pay if it means not getting food poisoning.
|
| The GDPR came to be because it was determined that the
| existing data protection regulations were inadequate
| _and_ the industry demonstrated that can 't be trusted to
| self-regulate.
| jen20 wrote:
| > they do not have the resources to do that.
|
| Good - the aim is for them to not store personal data in
| the first place, much less build business models that rely
| upon it. Rather than allowing the population to take on the
| negative externality of surveillance capitalism, it is
| absolutely right that the burden must fall on those
| creating the problem.
|
| I don't see this as any different to the complain that
| small restaurants cannot afford to pay their workers - if
| they can't afford to comply, they can't afford to be in
| business at all. It's simply a margin problem.
| Sujan wrote:
| The parent argument was about "to make it instant and
| pretty for you to look at all the data." - not GDPR in
| general, which I fully agree with and like very much. It
| is a very different thing if you give users the power to
| get their data, or want to force companies to present
| that data in a way laypersons can understand and "like".
| mindslight wrote:
| You're giving the argument too much credit. It's more
| akin to a large restaurant arguing that small restaurants
| could be put out of business by health inspections, so
| maybe we should hold off on the idea. Rather, keeping a
| clean kitchen is something they all should be doing
| anyway from the get go.
|
| Any pain for Amazon in Amazon's process is entirely
| Amazon's fault. If systems are built with the requirement
| of letting users export their data, then the additional
| effort to do so is trivial. This argument about the GDPR
| essentially boils down to _technical debt_ from companies
| that played fast and loose with personal information, and
| we shouldn 't entertain it.
| plandis wrote:
| > If systems are built with the requirement of letting
| users export their data, then the additional effort to do
| so is trivial.
|
| It's unreasonable, IMO, to think that companies should
| have had the foresight to see legislation that would
| happen two decades after the company had already existed
| and as a result build a system for retrieving user data
| that has no profit generating potential.
|
| GDPR is good because prior to it there really wasn't any
| economic incentive to provide this information.
| guitarbill wrote:
| Europeans have valued privacy and data protection for
| quite a while now culturally. The ePrivacy Directive is
| from 2002 (derisively referred to as the "cookie law").
| And GDPR had a multi-year grace period. It's simply a
| result of companies ignoring building these kind of
| functionality for far too long.
| dmitriid wrote:
| 1. Privacy legislation existed in European countries for
| years (and often for _decades_ )
|
| 2. GDPR was in the works for several years, and when it
| went in effect, companies were given _2 years_ to become
| compliant
|
| 3. GDPR went into effect _5 years_ ago, and has been
| enforced for _3 years_
|
| So please stop with the "poor companies could not foresee
| this, and didn't have the time to implement this"
| mindslight wrote:
| You're implying that arbitrary "legislation" just arose
| out of the blue. Rather, it's based on a long held idea
| that companies are merely trustees for customers' data.
| So their position is more akin to having built a shed
| straddling a property line a decade ago, and now
| complaining that they couldn't have known that their
| neighbor might eventually want it moved.
| plandis wrote:
| I never said GDPR is arbitrary legislation. In fact, I
| called it a good thing in my initial post.
|
| My point is that without legislation companies generally
| are not going to do things that don't make them profit
| directly or indirectly. Aggregating user data for users
| to see is not something that really generates revenue and
| so companies prior to GDPR didn't really do this en
| masse.
| mindslight wrote:
| Your argument rests on the idea that the GDPR was an
| unforeseeable (arbitrary) requirement, rather than a
| straightforward implementation of a predictably-relevant
| Schelling point. While businesses won't go out of their
| way to do things that don't generate revenue, it's not
| unreasonable to think they will do some basic forward-
| looking due diligence. When storing personal information
| on a whole bunch of people is a core part of your
| business, it's reasonable to expect that eventually those
| people will want some control over the records kept on
| them.
| passivate wrote:
| Small business have fewer customers. I imagine their
| workload will scale down to manageable levels. If not there
| will be market demand to create automation for whatever out
| of the box system they're using to maintain data.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Those smaller businesses will just use a standard webshop
| package that will incorporate this feature because most of
| their customers will want it.. The same way these companies
| use stuff like Magento or PrestaShop instead of rolling
| their own.
| Sujan wrote:
| Exactly. But that will something additional they will
| have to buy (and install, and maintain) if GDPR would
| include to "make it instant and pretty for you to look at
| all the data.". Because that is what the parent
| discussion was about.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Hmm I doubt it really. I think most webshops will just
| include this feature.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > each and every point in an article just feels "fabricated" or
| over the top.
|
| What I thought were valid points from the article:
|
| - Unclear data: "cryptic strings of numbers like
| '26,444,740,832,600,000" for various search queries." This is
| easily the worst offender IMO.
|
| - A wait time of 19 days
|
| - Separating the download into 74 buttons
| Sujan wrote:
| True, those are kind of valid.
|
| The unresolved foreign keys are indeed unfortunate, I
| wondered about these myself when I got my takeouts in the
| past. I explained them to myself as something that is not
| actually available in the same datastore to query or join,
| but maybe a constant or some other system that does not
| include personal data. Still not nice of course.
|
| I think the wait time and many download buttons were
| discussed extensively in other comments here. With cold
| storage as explanation for the duraiton, and just no legal
| need to make the takeout _convenient_, those also have a
| pretty good explanation I would say.
|
| So valid, but still no scandal.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Yup. I agree. The wait time doesn't make sense. They should
| be able to spin up extra servers from the spot market in
| seconds. Even if they're using Glacier, that should only be a
| few hours.
|
| I wonder if they execute the 74 data queries in serial to
| drag it out.
|
| And the multiple downloads is just bogus.
|
| That being said, I agree with the general point that the
| article is a bit overly dramatic. Amazon does a pretty good
| job with the request. It just takes too long.
| thayne wrote:
| I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was a human
| involved in gathering some of the data. If requests for
| data are rare enough, it might be more economical to pay
| someone in a customer support farm to collect some data
| than to pay for developing and maintaining an automated
| process. At least in the short term. Otoh, not automating
| something like this seems out of character for Amazon.
| blip54321 wrote:
| I've worked at an organization with a similar timeframe for
| some types of data requests (B2B, not GDPR-style ones).
| There were many parts of the organization which were
| mismanaged, but that wasn't one of them. That type of data
| request ("get all my data") involved walking through all
| the data we had. It wasn't indexed in a way which made it
| easy to grab.
|
| This was an expensive batched job we ran monthly. We spun
| up a cluster of cloud machines. A map-reduce style
| operation would organize the data by customer. We'd ship it
| off to all the customers who requested it that month.
|
| Adding appropriate indexes or similar would have been man-
| years of engineering work. This involved, for example,
| walking through server logs line-by-line and seeing which
| ones were associated with which customer.
|
| There wasn't a compelling business case to do that. For
| normal operations, once a month was fine. If a customer had
| a particular need,, we could hypothetically do a one-off
| request out-of-line, but customers used the data for types
| of analytics where a one-month delay wasn't an issue.
|
| I know of other pipelines with similar delays, for example,
| due to lack of automation. A person runs a task once a
| month, and automation would cost more than a person.
|
| I won't chalk this up to dark patterns, so much as speeding
| things up having zero business value to Amazon. I just
| walked through the process, and at least the first two
| steps seemed very normal. Amazon sometimes does outrageous
| things, but here, I saw nothing to get outraged about.
| encoderer wrote:
| I helped build a system for privacy compliance at a large
| non-faang tech company. Honestly 19 days seems crazy but
| this is what we dealt with:
|
| It's 2018 and you have to bolt this mass export/delete on
| _every_ stateful service in your company. Many of these are
| "critical" services that are not actively worked on and
| have a very limited maintenance budget. That is, some team
| with a lot of existing responsibilities absorbed it along
| the way and they have no bandwidth for it.
|
| So in some cases their mechanisms for retrieval/deletion
| were pretty egregious and so we agreed on a rate limit and
| we would queue these requests up and handle all of the
| paperwork. You get 30 days to comply and if you need
| another 30 all you have to do is send an update within the
| first 30.
|
| So, quite possibly, they have a rate limit and a queue on
| at least a handful of backend services and it truly truly
| does not matter as long as the queue is under 60 days.
| latexr wrote:
| > And bye to some Hacker News points.
|
| The lowest score you can get on a comment is -4
| (https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented#downvo...).
|
| > This will get nicely downvoted I suspect.
|
| Complaining about downvotes before they happen is more likely
| to get you downvotes than anything else you wrote in that post.
| Sujan wrote:
| Oh, I did not know that. Thanks. A bit less "aversion" then
| for the future.
|
| My last sentence was triggered by having written a comment on
| another comment first, which insantly went to -3 (but later
| kinda recovered), so I almost didn't write this one, just not
| to have to get the negative feeling. It's a nice Sunday after
| all.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Don't sweat it. None of us will lay upon our death-beds
| wishing we had scored more points in an internet popularity
| contest.
|
| Sometimes a downvote is because you made a salient and
| equitable point that threatened someone's cookie jar, an
| angry conservative enraged that someone expressed a
| progressive view (and vice versa), some humourless bastard
| who failed or declined to recognise what you thought to be
| in obvious jest, or a narcissistic asshole incensed that
| you dared observe their poor behaviour. These you may
| consider to be upvotes in disguise.
|
| Notwithstanding all this, I suspect you will also discover
| there's a strong current of support for those surgically
| dismantling yellow journalism.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >The need to verify or activate a data request via clicking a
| link? Of course required so some third party can not just
| request your data to your inbox (and process it along the way)
| without you actually wanting to do that.
|
| You mean like some data hoarding company that offers free email
| that scans all of your messages to provide better "sorting",
| provide quickly accessible Tracking buttons, or similar
| features? Would something like that be considered doing evil?
|
| >(And bye to some Hacker News points. This will get nicely
| downvoted I suspect.)
|
| meh. The loss of 4 points is nothing when making valid points
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Clicking "Remove address" only removes it from the list of
| addresses? Of course, addresses you ordered to in the past can
| not be deleted as they have to legally be stored together with
| other order information.
|
| I agree. The author set out with an agenda and spun every step
| of the process in the most negative way they could come up
| with.
|
| There are some legitimate complaints (wait time, for example)
| but it's hard to take these articles seriously when it's clear
| that the author started with a conclusion and tried to work
| backward to build a story around it.
|
| Sadly, these articles get a lot of clicks and shares because
| "your data" has become a nebulous scare phrase in journalism
| and Amazon is a popular company to hate right now.
|
| That said, I bet if any one of our own employers was subjected
| to the same treatment by the same author with the same agenda,
| we wouldn't come out much better. If someone wants to smear a
| company, they will.
|
| Data export can be very confusing for end users, especially
| when they discover things like their shipping record with old
| addresses isn't deleted when they remove the address from their
| address book. The old shipping records are necessary for
| everything from customer support to warrant claims to fraud
| detection to recall notices to regulatory compliance. Trying to
| shame Amazon for literally just keeping shipping records is
| bananas.
| naoqj wrote:
| >I get that it is scary that a big company keeps all the data
| you gave to them.
|
| Situation in 2022: it is scary that someone has something I
| willingly gave them.
| Sujan wrote:
| There still is no viable sarcasm tag for plain text that
| everyone will pick up :)
| jjulius wrote:
| Define "willing" in this context, though. You, myself and
| most people on HN have a really good idea of what data we
| willingly give Amazon, while the average person does not. Is
| it really an accurate statement that people willingly give
| them their data when they don't actually know what they're
| giving?
| naoqj wrote:
| What data does Amazon have that you haven't given them?
| msrenee wrote:
| Well shoot, I've never thought of it that way. I guess
| it's perfectly reasonable that they've extrapolated my
| behavior out so they know when to raise the price of
| items I intend to purchase. Yep, not underhanded at all.
| jjulius wrote:
| You're misunderstanding. I will rephrase:
|
| You said that everyone "willingly" gives Amazon their
| data. The average person does not know what kind of data
| Amazon collects on them, therefore I am positing that
| it's not fair to say that they are willingly giving it
| over.
| naoqj wrote:
| Do you think that if you asked random people something
| like...
|
| "Do you think that Amazon stores a list of the items that
| you have bought from them and the addresses where they
| sent them"
|
| ...the majority would say no?
| jjulius wrote:
| And if you asked them to tell you every other bit of data
| Amazon collects on them, do you think they would be able
| to tell you what all of that is? Because common knowledge
| within the tech community - _and as evidenced in the
| article we are discussing_ - make very clear that that 's
| not the only data they gather on you.
| akerl_ wrote:
| The average non-technical person I've talked to has
| posited that Amazon is actively, persistently listening
| via their Alexa-enabled devices and using that audio to
| drive recommendations.
|
| This doesn't seem to deter any of the people who've
| mentioned it from purchasing and plugging in Alexa-
| enabled devices, or from shopping on Amazon.
|
| I don't think you're giving non-technical people enough
| credit. They may not know the exact mechanisms, but
| they're generally aware that companies are monitoring
| their activity and using it to market to them; it's just
| not a big deal to them.
| kerng wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the comment the other commenter
| made - there is a lot of info Amazon has about one that
| is collected via dark patterns.
|
| Also, Don't they also buy data from 3rd parties to
| augment what you give them? Like stats of credit card
| purchases and stuff? Always assuming that all these big
| players do that.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Also, Don't they also buy data from 3rd parties to
| augment what you give them? Like stats of credit card
| purchases and stuff? Always assuming that all these big
| players do that.
|
| They do! That's even mentioned in this article.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Agreed, I have successfully downloaded my order history from
| the beginning of my account, very interesting to look through.
| Though I'm not sure why I was buying solaris books in 1999 :)
| Others like enders game I still remember.
| msrenee wrote:
| That search you suggested doesn't appear to exist in the app.
| You mind telling me how to access this data through the app if
| it's so easy?
| Sujan wrote:
| For me (amazon.de, EN language setting): Open app -> "More"
| burger menu botton right (three horizontal lines stacked on
| top of each other) -> Scroll down to "Customer service" ->
| Scroll down to search feature -> "Personal Information" ->
| #1. I think this is really just a webview to the same part of
| the website with a different design.
|
| Takes a bit more tapping and scrolling than clicking on
| desktop, but that is more he fault of the smaller screen and
| how apps work I would guess.
| msrenee wrote:
| Ah, it was only like 5 options deep and then it gave me a
| chat "assistant" which I used to search the term "my data"
| which gave me the link and the drop down box mentioned in
| the article to scroll to the bottom of to request my data.
| Which sent an email to my husband's email address that I
| need to open to confirm the request. Super easy. Not hidden
| at all.
| kerng wrote:
| I like this detailed walk throughs, although obviously subjective
| it reflects well on the many obstacles and dark patterns that are
| put in the way.
|
| The "funniest" one certainly is that there are dozens of download
| buttons to actually download the data in the end.
|
| So, it seems understandable that the author got quite frustrated
| with this process Amazon built.
| yoaviram wrote:
| I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org, a service which
| automates the process of sending data requests (it's free, open
| source and were a registered charity). What is described in this
| article is, unfortunately, a common case with _some_ big tech
| companies.
|
| I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion
| requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's dark
| patterns all the way down.
|
| The solution is to escalate your request to the local data
| protection agency (attorney general in case of California). I
| believe that if enough of us do this it will make a difference,
| even in the case of Amazon.
|
| Following this realization we've recently added an optional
| features which will follow up with you some time after a request
| is made, and depending on the outcome, offer to automate the
| escalation process.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| I have been asking a broker to remove my data for weeks and
| they are giving me the runaround. However, I'm not in CA
| (another US state). Anything I can do?
| yoaviram wrote:
| Please send me an email with the details (it's on the
| website).
| lelandfe wrote:
| > I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion
| requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's
| dark patterns all the way down.
|
| I would love to read a long form piece on your findings!
|
| It sounds like it would a great way to advertise
| YourDigitalRights as well.
| yoaviram wrote:
| We're going to be speaking about this at Good Tech Fest 2022
| [1], and will also write it up post it to HN.
|
| https://www.goodtechfest.com/good-tech-fest-2022
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion
| requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens."
|
| Another idea for an experiment is to send 600 data deletion
| requests from 600 unique computer users simultaneously to a
| single data broker and see what happens. If the escalation
| process is automated when the data broker fails to respond, the
| most interesting results IMO will be from the data protection
| agency. It is difficult to ignore 600 cases. It also tests the
| broker's and agency's systems. In theory these systems should
| be able to scale. If they cannot, then it is arguable the
| broker and/or agency is making an assumption that privacy is
| something that only some people, a relatively small number,
| care about. At the very least there would be a question of
| whether these systems are adequate for what they are supposed
| to do.
|
| This experiment might be thought of like a petition that
| requires a minimum number of signatures. What is the purpose
| behind having petitions and minimums for the number of people
| who sign them. Here, a minimum number of people must sign on to
| make a data deletion request before the bundle of requests are
| actually sent.
| bobmichael wrote:
| That's so great. I wish there was something like this for
| Germany.
| yoaviram wrote:
| We support the GDPR, so it will work in Germany.
| bobmichael wrote:
| When I went to the German site and tried to generate a data
| request, the generated email was in English. Is that
| intended? I think I'm Germany you're much more likely to
| get a response if you write in German.
| vmception wrote:
| Can we have a non profit for this? I think one of the issues
| for getting tax exempt status is designating a "charitable
| class" of people that it would be helping
| verve_rat wrote:
| Um, they are a charity?
| vmception wrote:
| > Conscious Digital MTU is a registered Estonian non-profit
| organization number 80600079.
|
| Ah they are, wonder about the US version
|
| The tax deductibility for us tax residents is a working
| major incentive
| mahastore wrote:
| What is the process of getting all my data collected by GOOGLE
| and MICROSOFT?
| yoaviram wrote:
| https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/google.com
| https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/microsoft.com
| https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/apple.com
| https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/walmart.com
| mahastore wrote:
| and APPLE?
| mahastore wrote:
| and WALMART
| [deleted]
| TeeMassive wrote:
| You're doing privacy a great service, you're charity is
| awesome!
|
| Are your services also work outside of the US, like, say,
| Canada?
| yoaviram wrote:
| Thank you! We are about to launch support for the Brazilian
| LGPD, and have 17 other regulations we want to support this
| year, including Canada.
| oriettaxx wrote:
| I tried one time, they wrote me they where going to send me my
| data, but never did (!)
|
| I gave up
|
| I'll try again now :)
| oriettaxx wrote:
| "more than a month" :)
|
| > Data Request Confirmation
|
| > We've received and are processing your request to access your
| personal data.
|
| > We will provide your information to you as soon as we can.
|
| > Usually, this should not take more than a month.
|
| >In exceptional cases, for example if a request is more complex
| or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it might
| take longer, but if so we will notify you that there will be a
| delay.
| oyebenny wrote:
| My Amazon account got accessed from within. Several Amazon
| employees/reps confirm it. But when I asked who and what happened
| to the employees who did they don't tell me anything. It's
| ANNOYING.
| bigyellow wrote:
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data
| request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5
| days to process a data request, as per the company's California
| Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020.
|
| That's interesting but not particularly surprising. I bet the
| median request isn't for _all_ data. An all-data request may
| involve pulling data from cold-storage, which I 'm not surprised
| would take 2+ weeks (it's quite possibly a relatively manual
| process).
| rdiddly wrote:
| The article would be stronger if it didn't overreact and
| exaggerate, but then again I do appreciate the sarcasm. The 74
| zip files are the most egregious part of it though. You can't zip
| those mofos into one file? It's spiteful somehow, like you asked
| for water and Amazon said "Here you go" and threw it in your
| face.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The full, complete set of tedium the author describes is:
|
| * Navigate through a handful of pages.
|
| * Scroll to the bottom of a menu.
|
| * Click an email confirmation link.
|
| * Wait 19 days.
|
| * Click 74 download links.
|
| That last part is pretty dumb! But it's also the only thing that
| seems remotely tedious, and I'm not sure where at any point he'd
| be confused. The author implies some sort of issue with the 19
| day waiting period, but it seems entirely plausible to me that
| many of the datasets being requested have "ask an engineer to run
| through this long manual process" as a dependency.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Distributed systems store information in different databases
| and warehouses. You don't want your Amazon.com retail data co-
| mingled with Alexa data for multiple reasons. Two of the
| preeminent security concepts is least privilege and data
| segregation.
|
| Your data exists in different files and databases. That's why
| you get multiple files containing your data. And let's ignore
| that the zip archives contain files of different types.
|
| If all the files were of the same type, what would you prefer,
| that Amazon edit these files and combine them into a single
| file? How could you prove that Amazon didn't edit out any files
| maliciously?
|
| The typical way to verify file integrity is by checking hash
| sums. But here you don't have access to the original hashes
| (because they're internal Amazon files). Even if you had access
| to the hashes, we know the hashes wouldn't match because we're
| presupposing that the files have been modified to combine them.
|
| If they were to combine all the files together, there would be
| no way for Amazon to document that nothing was changed. Which
| means the process isn't auditable, and people will come up with
| conspiracies about how big bad Amazon is sanitizing files
| before sending them out.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > what would you prefer, that Amazon edit these files and
| combine them into a single file
|
| This, additionally, adds the complication that they could be
| accused of making the data onerous to access by providing it
| as a monolithic zip, too big for some users to download over
| unreliable connections.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| 74 zip files could themselves be added unmodified as 74
| individual entries within a parent zip file, optionally, for
| ease of download convenience. The hashes of those 74 zip
| files within the parent zip file would be just as auditable
| as with the current process.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| That's true, but then people will complain that they had to
| unzip 75 files instead of 74. The real issue here is that
| there are 74 files. Which is an issue without a good
| solution.
| folmar wrote:
| Unzipping 75 files is a one click job on any reasonably
| current system I know of.
| pacaro wrote:
| I very much doubt that there is any human interaction on the
| Amazon end of this workflow.
|
| What seems more likely is that because this doesn't generate
| revenue it gets the minimum resources necessary to complete the
| request within some legally mandated time frame. The request
| probably sits in queues for most of its life.
|
| If a court order requests these same data, I suspect that it
| can be produced in under 24 hours
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| And you'd be wrong. There are humans involved at every level
| of GDPR requests.
|
| Signed,
|
| Someone who has handled such requests for AWS
| pacaro wrote:
| That feels like an untenable solution, it wouldn't take
| much to create a denial of service...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Very little about GDPR was designed with technical
| reality in mind. It's a grand example of using the mallet
| of law to try and beat the world into the shape someone
| wants it in, ignorant of _why_ it 's in the shape it's
| currently in.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That last part is pretty dumb!
|
| It's not just dumb, the whole process is at the edges of the
| law. Art. 12 GDPR mandates "intelligible and easily accessible
| form", which navigating through a number of pages, wait times
| and finally a 74-link download is certainly not fulfilling.
|
| The gold standard, for what it's worth, is a direct link from
| the privacy policy page in the section that details GDPR
| subject rights to the page that provides the download -
| basically, three clicks in total.
|
| > but it seems entirely plausible to me that many of the
| datasets being requested have "ask an engineer to run through
| this long manual process" as a dependency.
|
| Which is ridiculous for a company at Amazon's scale and again
| at the edges of legality - Art. 12 GDPR mandates "without undue
| delay" and the one month is clearly meant as an upper bound
| here, not as the regular case.
|
| That is the problem with American companies and also the US
| government: they _all_ default to hoard data in warehouses and
| make use of it later, and completely ignoring that all the data
| they hoard must also be made accessible to the people it 's
| related to.
| plandis wrote:
| Clicking a bunch of links is pretty accessible, perhaps
| you're translating accessible to convenient?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The spirit of the GDPR law was to make life for people
| easier. Putting hoops in front of users that are clearly
| not needed - Amazon could, for example, offer a single ZIP
| file like Twitter does - _will_ some day earn them trouble.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is yet another example of how the GDPR is bad law.
| "Intelligible and easily accessible" is way too vague.
|
| Are 74 zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of
| course not! I don't want to pull 74 links!
|
| Is 1 zip file intelligible and easily accessible? Of course
| not! Way too big to pull in over my low-bandwidth connection.
|
| Are zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of course
| not! Not everyone understands compression.
|
| ...etc., etc. I'd have a lot more respect for that law if it
| spelled out concretes instead of handwaving technical details
| and leaving it up to regulators to decide what passes and
| what doesn't.
| dmitriid wrote:
| This is yet another example of a random commenter on HN
| parroting "GPDR bad" nonsense while being intentionally
| obtuse.
|
| Laws are often written with "common sense" in mind. HN
| commentators prefer to eschew common sense to try and
| excuse bad actors, bad behaviour, bad UX, bad anything.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That is how laws are usually written. Hashing out the
| details will be done by the courts.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| having to wait 19 days is really unnaceptable. the rest are
| just annoying
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I can imagine it takes a month so older backups can cycle out and
| then don't have to dredge up data they're about to no longer keep
| on you anyway.
| amelius wrote:
| Has anyone tried to get their data from Apple? Was the experience
| any different?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm more of an anti-Facebook bias person myself
| [deleted]
| ourmandave wrote:
| Probably easier to buy it off the Dark Web.
|
| And what is the Bitcoin to Bezo Bucks conversion rate right now?
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| One the things people can ask for is who data is shared with. Its
| a massive paper trail but so many entities dont want to comply
| with data protection laws, its not just big tech its any large
| entity because interpretation of the laws is so vague, but thats
| the beauty of legislation, its vague.
| noasaservice wrote:
| > It's a bit like if you have a stalker who's been shadowing you
| around, meticulously documenting everywhere you go, everyone you
| talk to, and everything you do, who's now handing you a form to
| fill out if you want to see the boxes of files they've been
| keeping on you.
|
| This has me thinking. I can get an injunction for a human stalker
| who's going after me at home, my workplace, following me wherever
| I go, etc.
|
| According to US law, companies are also people. So, why can't I
| get an injunction against, say, Facebook/Meta ?
|
| Get enough of these injunctions, and these shitty privacy-
| invading data blackholes would dry up pretty quick. If they
| don't, then they'd be liable for violating court orders. That
| usually never ends up well.
| amelius wrote:
| Because you clicked Yes on their EULA.
| noasaservice wrote:
| I said facebook for a *very* specific reason:
| https://medium.com/@SpiderOak/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-
| pro...
|
| There's absolutely NO agreement with shadow profiles.
|
| And on to your EULA excuse - show the court that:
|
| 1. That YOU accepted a EULA
|
| 2. That the EULA was even presented
|
| 3. That the EULA agreed (if proven) is the same one withe the
| onerous terms
|
| 4. That the user didn't revoke permissions (affirmative
| consent is a thing)
| amelius wrote:
| I agree with you, but it might be difficult to prove that
| someone is keeping a shadow profile.
| Sujan wrote:
| The difference between a stalker and Amazon is that Amazon does
| not get any data from you (or at least 99% of what this author
| could request from Amazon, some ad tracking stuff might be an
| exception) if you do not willingy give it to them. Don't have
| an Amazon account and use it do order things or search, talk to
| Alexa, etc - and they will have no data.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| I'd think that like fb, they collect data on individuals
| regardless of accounts. One example of this is their facial
| recognition services. Given that they force higher pricing of
| products not on their page, it becomes challenging to simply
| "go somewhere else." It's also been shown that they extract
| business data from their aws customers.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This totally disregards the concept of shadow profiles..
| elygre wrote:
| I did this myself a month ago or so. In addition to the process
| and the multiple downloads, I was very fascinated to discover
| that many reports were delivered as PDF. Why would that be, if
| not to make it more difficult to access?
| y04nn wrote:
| I had to click through more than 100 links to download all the
| data, how can this be acceptable? Specially coming from Amazon.
| How hard is it for them to create an archive with all the data?
| This is ridiculous, I can't imagine how was the meeting when they
| decided to produce purposefully such garbage UX.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| Exactly the problem I had.
|
| It would take Amazon almost no effort to make a single archive
| with all those files in.
|
| I cannot help but view this as deliberate obstruction.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Can't you open up the developer tools use a css query to select
| all the buttons, and send a click event to them all?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Here's a picture of the UI for the download, with 123 different
| "Download" buttons.
| https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1503848290193862658
|
| I did an Amazon download too, after Amazon's subsidiary
| Goodreads lost all my data of 9 years. I'm grateful for how the
| GDPR and the CCPA mandate that companies provide data
| downloads. Amazon is clearly doing the bare minimum to comply.
| Other companies do more; Twitter's data download comes with a
| fully working offline Javascript app for reading and searching
| your tweets!
| IshKebab wrote:
| Pretty sure there are a gazillion browser extensions that can
| do that for you. Not ideal but hardly the end of the world.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| When you buy from Amazon, you are supporting their various awful
| practices. Yes, you
| m1gu3l wrote:
| I will never be able to reconcile humans simultaneous need for
| everything to be good and pure but you know also cheap shit.
| Accept and embrace the gray area we all live in.
| eranation wrote:
| The multiple download buttons is not a dark pattern to prevent
| you from downloading your data, it's just bad UX, it's a feature
| you add to check a legal box and it doesn't get priority for
| usability. Probably someone just shrugged, this is good enough
| and moved on. They should definitely give you it all in one zip
| file but "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by a developer rushing to get something done by making
| it just barely usable" (the fact I worked at AWS as a development
| manager has nothing to do with the above and is solely my
| opinion)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok well, the same thing could be said by any organization in
| the world regarding any dark pattern ascribed to them.
|
| As far as never ascribing, if a company is super big and rich
| and would find it beneficial if people give up trying to do
| something because of bad UX I think it's a reasonable
| assumption that the bad UX is an example of a dark pattern.
| Otherwise this helpful concept to describe actual things that
| companies do to tire out users and get them to relent in doing
| things the companies don't want done would have to disappear.
|
| TLDR: If what Amazon is doing here isn't a dark pattern, what
| is?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Even if this were the case, it'd still be customer time
| neglicience. This is one of the largest companies in the world
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| > it's just bad UX
|
| "Bad" I would say means you can still achieve your task.
|
| I was presented with over sixty download links, and not being
| an idiot or someone to be taken for a ride, I refused to go
| along with it, and that means the UI is not bad but _failed_.
|
| What's more, it OBVIOUSLY failed.
|
| There's no way a single person at Amazon could have genuinely
| sat there and thought, "yes, this, THIS is it, THIS is the
| right way to make this page", not, that is, if their goal was
| the user actually getting hold of their data.
| the_duke wrote:
| Is the ridiculously annoying process for ending your Prime
| subscription also just accidental, bad UX?
|
| It miraculously uses very similar patterns.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| True, and the ridiculously easy process to accidentally sign
| up for a subscription to each of your smallest of purchases.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It makes sense that Amazon would dedicate resources to
| making the sign up processes easier because it actually
| makes them more money compared to making the cancelling
| easier. That would be a waste of time to work on.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| This is unnaceptable given how inportant user interface is the
| rest of the site. one click shopping
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| If the developers felt rushed to make such a feature that is
| the fault of their management but given the history of Amazon
| which includes publicly facing service status boards that don't
| update unless senior management approve the outage it is more
| likely that Amazon doesn't really want people to know what they
| know about their users.
| r_singh wrote:
| Does anyone know if companies are obliged to do this in india?
| gigel82 wrote:
| Yes, they have multiple download buttons and it takes a bit, but
| I got the same with Google; it only took a few minutes to
| download the data once made available.
|
| I was most surprised by the sheer amount of audio data kept: in
| my case, more than 5Gb of wave files dating back to when I set up
| my first Alexa 6 years ago. I believe at least 50% of everything
| Alexa heard in my house is recorded there. That's when I started
| looking for an offline alternative, since -after the initial
| novelty wore off- we're only using it to listen to music, turn
| on/off smart home lights and ask the occasional random question
| (convert C to F, etc.).
| inopinatus wrote:
| One of those relatively few circumstances where structuring the
| company into service teams is nothing but a hurdle, rather than a
| net advantage, to delivering on customer expectations.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| HN probably aren't _required_ to let me download my data, but it
| sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?
| rdiddly wrote:
| You can do it if you know how to use an API. See the 'API' link
| at the bottom of the page.
| oauea wrote:
| Will this include all logs & data that aren't publicly
| visible? The HN software employs various dark patterns such
| as shadowbanning & rate limiting accounts, all this info
| would have to be disclosed to, in addition to any internal
| communication about your account.
| [deleted]
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Really? I would have expected a bigger outcry if GDPR et
| al. required disclosure of shadowbanning & rate limits;
| could you possibly direct me to where I can find the exact
| requirements? Because that sounds like great fun to go
| exercise.
| gdulli wrote:
| I consider HN to be one of the most user hostile sites there is
| regarding user content because they don't allow deleting
| comments. They force people into making a manual request. Which
| means the feature essentially doesn't exist for casual use.
| inopinatus wrote:
| The right to be forgotten is in tension with the need to
| preserve public discourse.
|
| Nevertheless I have deleted many comments within the
| available regret window. I do wonder whether they're actually
| removed from storage, or merely elided by software.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm sure it does as many third party clients offer features
| where you can read back your own posts etc.
| karlicoss wrote:
| I'm personally using https://github.com/dogsheep/hacker-news-
| to-sqlite#usage, it's great. You basically just need your
| username and that's it
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ooh nice thanks for the tip!!
|
| I'm making a "life log" system that stores stuff I do
| online automatically. This will come in very handy.
| karlicoss wrote:
| Oooh, I'm a big fun of lifelogging! You might want to
| check out some of my projects like
| https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme :)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Nice, I had no idea this was already 'a thing' :) Thanks
| again for this!
|
| What I want to do is indeed capture my emails, social
| media posts, photos, location data and chats (I run
| everything through Matrix anyway so that's pretty easy).
| And then store it in a database (or just a filesystem per
| day, not sure about that yet - I see your concerns about
| databases for this and I agree). With the more sensitive
| stuff GPG encrypted.
|
| I'll see if your projects can help me out with this,
| thanks! Like you say in your readme, indeed my goal is to
| regain control of my information. And enable myself to
| actually do something with it.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Actually, that's a question; the GDPR (Europe) and the CCPA
| (California) both require data download options. I don't know
| if Hacker News is a business that qualifies for this regulation
| though.
| jrmann100 wrote:
| Wired Magazine recently did a feature on "Amazon's Dark Secret"
| of what this mess looks like from the inside:
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-failed-to-protect-your-da...
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That is something that I like about Google. It only takes a
| minute to get to what they admit to data they have collected.
| Also easy to dump all data and then download it a few hours
| later. I mostly just use paid for services (GCP, Play books and
| movies, sometimes Colab Pro), but Gmail is my backup email and I
| like to download that occasionally.
|
| re: Amazon: I like to refresh my VPN IP address, and go to Amazon
| in a private browser tab to avoid being "gamed" on item pricing.
| I login once I have the price set.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| I've been trying for over two years to get my data from Amazon.
|
| I eventually got to a point where Amazon provided a web-page,
| which has no less than _sixty-two_ download links on, each of
| which would have to be manually operated.
|
| It's properly tantamount to obstruction.
|
| After finally reaching this point, Support were arrogant and
| high-handed - "We will not do any more than we have. We look
| forward to seeing you on Amazon in the future."
|
| I still do not have my data.
|
| I tried to start the process off a second time, but it went
| nowhere. I chased it, and then had some very disconnected and
| confusing responsese from Support (email from some random guy in
| Support who by the looks of it had been told to email me, but
| neither he had been told what for, nor I that it would happen).
|
| I've not spent more time on it since then.
|
| I stopped using Amazon about two years ago, because I've come to
| the view that the stories about how Amazon treats warehouse staff
| are accurate.
|
| I want to get my personal data, so I can close the account.
|
| Amazon of course refuse point blank (in the usual, slimey,
| support-talking-past-you way) to delete any personal data, so all
| you can do is delete the account and hope in the end Amazon
| expire the data.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > I eventually got to a point where Amazon provided a web-page,
| which has no less than sixty-two download links on, each of
| which would have to be manually operated.
|
| > I still do not have my data.
|
| > I want to get my personal data
|
| Is there a good reason why you don't take the three minutes to
| click the 62 download links?
| jaclaz wrote:
| What I found "queer" (besides the tediousness/whining) was the:
|
| >It's not explained how Amazon acquires this third-party audience
| data, but according to this dataset I apparently am a homeowner,
| in possession of a luxury sedan and SUV, and in the 45 to 54 age
| range. This was all news to me, as I am none of those things.
|
| This kind of data is seemingly what "circulates" about you and on
| which advertising statistics and targeting are made.
|
| Should we believe that it is only a singular glitch or that most
| of these data is simply wrong/made up?
| salawat wrote:
| Probably LexisNexus. Their sales offerings will promise
| datasets offering information on political affiliation and
| marital status of arbitrary addresses.
|
| Or info shared from partners/affiliates. People talk about you,
| and most of it is BS, but you as the consumer should just
| accept it so businesses can monetize their datasets!
|
| Ain't it great?
| legitster wrote:
| I run a part of the data request process at our company. This
| article is an example where people expect anything technology
| related to be magic.
|
| We have to go through EVERY tech stack we own and look for that
| person's data. It's amazingly manual and tedious and takes about
| 6 people about an hour per request.
|
| We're working to automate it, but needless to say we try not to
| broadcast it too broadly.
|
| I hate that everyone jumps on any bad experience as a "dark
| pattern" when there's plenty of incompetence to share the blame.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| I understand what you mean and I agree about everyone whining
| that the "sky is falling" but in my opinion, you shouldn't
| collect what you can't easily give me.
| lelandfe wrote:
| It's revealing how hard this stuff is when Google's Data
| Liberation Front needed 4 years to release Google Takeout -
| which I consider to be best-in-class for personal data access.
| jsnell wrote:
| It is a hard problem, but the GDPR went into effect 3 years
| and 10 months ago. That date didn't come as a surprise, but
| was known 6 years ago. Anything newer than that should have
| taken data requests into account from the design stage.
| Anything older than that has had ample time to adjust. More
| than that 4 years you quote for Takeout!
| blip54321 wrote:
| I disagree. Google Takeout is a sham. It doesn't have all the
| data they collect about you. It's almost adequate for data
| portability, but not quite. It's useless for data
| transparency.
|
| Google Docs keeps keystroke-level logs of everything you
| type, for example. That's not in Takeout. Neither are things
| needed to conduct a security audit (that's a paid service for
| Workspace customers). Neither is a lot of advertising
| profiling data.
| alias_neo wrote:
| > I hate that everyone jumps on any bad experience as a "dark
| pattern" when there's plenty of incompetence to share the
| blame.
|
| While I understand you; this is Amazon. It's laughable to
| think, for an organisation with the technology and resources of
| Amazon, that this is anything but laziness, "malicious
| compliance" or a deliberate "fuck you".
|
| Having me forced to click over a hundred download buttons to
| get the data I requested is not ok for a company Amazon's size
| and is not because they couldn't spare the resources to have
| someone write a few lines of code to archive those into a
| single tar.gz/zip and provide one button to click, it's
| deliberate.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > We have to go through EVERY tech stack we own and look for
| that person's data. It's amazingly manual and tedious and takes
| about 6 people about an hour per request.
|
| GDPR went into effect _5 years ago_. If 5 years later you still
| haven 't automated this...
| bstrawson wrote:
| People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The author may
| want to read the privacy policy[0] for the site they are
| publishing their story on. They are collecting all sorts of data
| that they don't need to. And IANAL but apparently your rights to
| access the data they hold on you are restricted only to locations
| where they legally have to allow it.
|
| [0] https://theintercept.com/privacy-policy/
| nicwolff wrote:
| > which once again (for the sixth and, mercifully, final time)
| helpfully reminded me that "You can access a lot of your data
| instantly, as well as update your personal information, from Your
| Account."
|
| It's a shared page template, man. No need to hyperventilate.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I had the exact same experience. I wouldn't mind if they would be
| sued for this. It's audacious, a dark pattern, user hostile,
| lazy.
| MaxGanzII wrote:
| It's arrogant, high-handed and evil.
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