Protect Your Privacy from Amazon: Ten Tips
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Dear privacy seekers,
Each and every second Amazon earns $5,000 in sales. That’s nearly $500 million each day. I’m sure you and I contribute to this extraordinary statistic.
But shopping is only one part of Amazon’s $1.6 trillion market cap and deep pockets. They also have Amazon Web Services (AWS). These are server farms—warehouses full of computers—that power nearly 50% of the Internet. If Amazon were to stop functioning you could say goodbye to Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, Airbnb, the CDC website, and a few other million. Amazon has used this monopoly position to bully those with whom they they find it prudent to disagree. Earlier this year (2021) they forced the Facebook-alternative Parler to leave their servers essentially because they disliked their politics.
This is just a taste of Amazon’s vast empire. As expected from one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Amazon has its fingers in all manner of things: artificial intelligence, facial recognition, data collection, robotics, electric cars (Rivian), food (Whole Foods), video gaming streaming (Twitch), etc. They have massive contracts with the US government such that Jeff Bezos built a $23 million mansion in Washington D.C. (District of Criminals) and in 2013 purchased The Washington Post. As is increasingly the case with Big Data, the information you give to one sector of Amazon can end up in the other corners of their business—or with their government buddies. And anyone who hacks them or any disgruntled employees along the way.
In other words, it might be to your benefit to keep your data (and money) away from Amazon. I don’t have to tell you that Amazon does not have privacy as one of its core values, and its increasing influence on our lives should have you worried about feeding the beast. For example the recent news that Amazon’s Sidewalk system, which aims to connect all of its online devices across the globe, frankly reads like Skynet from Terminator fame. If you’re still not convinced, note their recent hiring of former NSA director Keith Alexander: the person arguably most responsible for the anti-American mass surveillance campaigns exposed by Edward Snowden and others. As Snowden remarked: “It turns out ‘Hey Alexa’ is short for ‘Hey Keith Alexander.’”
So while you and I have benefited from Amazon greatly, and I currently have my book on their store, I think it wise to remove some of your exposure to them. Here are ten ideas for doing so, whose principles you can use with other companies.
1) Buy more things outside of Amazon. Get off your butt and visit some brick-and-mortar stores when you need something. At the very least try other online stores that are not Amazon. Ebay has a good selection of similar items. Newegg has electronics. You can also find a product on Amazon and go directly to that company’s website. If you have no clue what the alternatives are, then this fact alone should be a wake-up call that Amazon has you in its clutches. Try this. Make a promise to yourself: every other time you go to Amazon with the intent to buy something, buy it from somewhere else, and ideally from a brick-and-mortar store with cash. We are really going to regret ignoring these options when they go out of business for good.
2) Do not connect your Amazon products or accounts. What am I talking about? Amazon owns Goodreads, Twitch, Whole Foods, Audible, IMDB, Ring Doorbell, and Zappos Shoes. They own a lot of stuff, and want to connect it all for their greater marketing benefit. Is saving thirty cents on avocados at Whole Foods worth telling Amazon what foods and supplements you buy, when you buy them, and where? Not in my opinion. And when Amazon Pharmacy comes online, I will not be buying anything from it either. If you need some imagination about how all this tracking can go wrong, go read the introduction to my book.
Privacy involves having fewer accounts and never linking them if you can help it. Do not connect your accounts. Do not participate in the Internet of Things. Keep things isolated.
3) Don’t search on Amazon while logged in to your account. Amazon does not need to study your search process and collect all that extra data. I use a history-free and cookie-free browser (see the “How to Use the Internet” section in my book). I’ll search for something on Amazon, then exit (clearing my history) and then open a clean browser, log in, and buy. You could also search on one browser for Amazon items and use another different browser to log in and purchase it. I prefer never to be logged in to anything so I can make that purposeful decision to log in when the time comes. (Password managers make it easy to log-in to websites quickly).
4) Similarly, don’t arrive at an Amazon listing by outside means. What do I mean by that? Don’t click on Amazon links from blogs and articles if it will link to your logged-in account. There is all kinds of tracking at work here. Also, any time you copy and paste an Amazon URL, remove the junk after the product number. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Guide-Privacy-Financial-Lifestyle-ebook/dp/B08Q8MDLW6/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1611007132&sr=8-8. Do you see all of that extra stuff at the end? That’s tracking information that tells how you got there. Erase the ending and you’ll end up with: https://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Guide-Privacy-Financial-Lifestyle-ebook/dp/B08Q8MDLW6/. That’s better.
As a more universal lesson start paying attention to the URLs that you click on. Phishing attacks can be prevented by and large if one were to look and see that the website one is clicking on is not actually Amazon.com but onlineAmazon.com or whatever nefarious domain name a phishing attacker has come up with. I’m a big fan of copying and pasting URLs into the URL bar and then cutting and splicing and studying until I’m satisfied. Only then will I press enter.
5) Consider starting a new Amazon account. And then regularly create new ones. Look, here’s the facts: If you’ve had an Amazon account for a few years it has a tremendous history tied to it. All of these products identity you many times over.
Remember that if you use the same name, or payment method, or address, that new account will easily be linked with your previous one. So don’t do that. It’s difficult to change one’s payment method since one only has some many credits cards. You could use only gift cards, though that is difficult and requires you to train your account by starting with small gift card amounts and working up from there.
Instead, consider a service like Privacy.com. (See my book for details on setting it up.) Now you can create virtual debit cards that will work on Amazon and use any name for billing and shipping that you want. Consider taking out a postal box and ship items there in this fake shipping name. You can now order items with Amazon having no clue who you are and where you reside. And if you’re not willing to go this far, at least use some combination of these techniques to slow the information they have on you.
6) If you own an Alexa or a Ring doorbell or one of the other surveillance tools shared with police and other third parties, grind them into fine powder at the first opportunity. DO NOT SELL THESE. They may contain your personal information in their storage drives.
Look, I know a few people who owns these things and frankly I don’t visit them as often as I can help it. I’m not saying that something will go wrong, but part of having a privacy mindset is simply having a sense of the future and of the ways your data can be used against you. Think about the flow of information. Where are those videos kept and who has access? (answer: Amazon servers; likely many thousands of employees) What does Amazon do with these videos? How long before this database is hacked? What about your neighbor across the street who is being recorded at a distance every time it turns on? These questions especially apply for inside cameras. Who is listening on the other end? We already know that Amazon Alexas are listening at all times, and that police (in the US) have received permission from courts to listen to them. What have you said in the privacy of your home that you wouldn’t want a jury to hear?
The truth about house alarms is that because they have so many false alarms, many police ignore them or certainly put them as secondary on their list. Alexa and Ring Doorbells and whatever else Amazon comes up with is not worth the downside.
7) Avoid Kindle. Another privacy nightmare documenting your politics, interests, intellect (by means of how fast you read), your sleep pattern, time zone, location via your Wi-Fi, and many other things. If you must have a Kindle, choose a pared-down version and don’t connect it to the Internet. Instead choose the “download to Kindle” option when buying a book and manually transfer the file via the included cable. Also consider an alternative e-reader such as a Kobo if not for better privacy than at least for the sake of diversification and getting away from Amazon. If you’re worried about your books not converting to your new device, know that a great program called Calibre can be used to strip any restrictions on your books and help you put them onto another device.
8) Do not buy certain items on Amazon—unless you use the gift card method I mentioned above (and while using a VPN). If you buy a Glock 19 concealed carry holster on Amazon, what do you think that says about you? The United States voted in a Vice President who publicly laughed at the idea that constitutional gun ownership couldn’t be eradicated. Other items—about hacking, or radical politics, or self-defense tools—should be bought in person with cash. Or consult my book section “Acquire Things Secretly Online.”
One quick example in case you think this is overkill. Let’s say a man is pending a hearing about whether he can visit his children. The skeptical court room asks to subpoena his recent purchases and finds via Amazon that he bought a book about using psychedelics. That could easily be enough to keep him from his children. What I’m advocating is not crazy in the slightest.
9) Don’t have a “wish list” (which is public by default). That should be obvious and has embarrassed many a celebrity. And don’t share your Amazon account with another person.
10) Hide your public review account, which is what people see when you review a product. Go to “Account” then “Your Amazon profile.” Press “Edit your public profile” and make sure nothing there reveals you. Then go to privacy settings and uncheck everything. You might be unnerved to know that if you leave a review on a product the company who sells the product can actually acquire your email address from Amazon. They may also be able to connect that to the address they sent the item to. I’ve actually had this happen to me, where I left a negative review and the company sent me an email bribing me to remove it. You don’t want your review account to lead back to anywhere important.
Amazon is a juggernaut. They’ve provided a lot of value to people, but they are growing in directions I dislike, and currying favor with coercive government institutions that is unsettling, to say the least. Withhold as much as you can from them.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet
https://watchmanprivacy.com