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Comment by brigade | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's been annoying me lately because it somehow got convinced that I'm a 30 year old woman and won't stop showing me dresses and jewelry on the front page, neither of which I have ever bought. What can you even do when their core profile of you is completely off-base?

Amazon at least lets you fine-tune a little bit, but not enough to say, "no you're completely wrong" short of starting over with a new account. Which is a lot harder with physical stores...

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Check out http://www.amazon.com/gp/history/ and https://www.amazon.com/gp/yourstore/iyr where you can delete stuff that Amazon knows; this may fix recommendation problems.

Note, also, that Amazon has a checkbox along the lines of "this is a gift" in the purchasing workflow. I think this keeps the item out of your history.

Thanks for both of those links -- and for scaring the crap out of me when I clicked the second one and got to the bottom of the page.

"1 - 15 of 534"

Five hundred and thirty-four purchases. Like having a cattle prod jammed into the back of my head.

Yeah. Sometimes the stats get it horribly wrong. I recently purchased new stove plates and burners and that's pretty much all they've been recommending to me for a few weeks. As though it's some kind of oft-recurring purchase or something? It seems to me, at least in my case, that they're missing a crucial piece of data (frequency of purchasing a particular product), and I expect it to eventually correct itself.

But in your case, I have no idea. Maybe try contacting them?

...But I only watched Will and Grace one time, one day!

Wish I hadn't, 'cause TiVo now thinks I'm gay!

"What can you even do when their core profile of you is completely off-base?"

Shop logged out, don't log in until you've decided.

It's not hard to track you even this way, if you're using the same browser. You already have a unique code assigned to you (the session id) and they can make a permanent cookie too, so it will be the same the next time you open the browser. When you login, they just link everything together. I'm not saying they're doing it, but it's not hard to do. Of course, there are ways to avoid that, like using different browsers or removing cookies. And even this way, they can link your data with pretty with high accuracy if they use your ip and time (how many people that are on the same IP, that is known to belong to an ISP and not a corporate ip range shop on the same time on the same site?).

In reality, Amazon doesn't link incognito browsing to your regular session.

Probably not, but we're not as safe as we'd like to think we are.

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