Amazon Knows What You Buy. And It’s Building a Big Ad Business from It | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Knows What You Buy. And It’s Building a Big Ad Business from It

nytimes.com

20 pointspseudolus11 comments

Is this news or is it merely the daily “lets have the hive mind attack ${fill_in_tech_company_here}”?

We get these posts just about every day about why some tech company is horrible. It’s not why I personally come to hacker news to get indoctrinated with the political biases of these organizations. The quality of this site is decreasing because of this garbage.

agreed. anyone who didn't already know Amazon was collecting a literal treasure trove of each and every one of their customers' buying habits has either been living under a rock, or is delusional.

these articles that just re-state the completely obvious are really getting old.

The NYT editorial board seems to have a personal vendetta against FB/Amazon in particular. Twitter and Google get passes in mainstream media, for whatever reason.

I wish they would give the same scrutiny they gave to FB for the past year to Equifax or cellphone carriers that sell our location data.

Well, the NYT editorial board has been carrying a lot of water for Trump. Given his childish Jeff Bozo and Amazon Washington Post attacks, this would align nicely. So not a surprise, just more disappointment from the NYT.

Agreed. The first rule of Hacker News: You don't tell people about Hacker News.

It's becoming very reddity as of late

And in my opinion Amazon has been the fairest of them all. They are having issues with too many sellers and poor quality items but you can return the items and customer service has been exceptionally good.

The worst has been Google with their non-existent customer support and their random ban hammer and "youtube heros" type of witch hunting support.

This might be a blessing in disguise, given how horrendous Amazon's product search is. If they target me correctly, I might not have to go through ten pages of useless results to find something...

I routinely get emails from them advertising selections of products which suggest they have almost zero idea of what I might be interested in.

Amazon selling ads seems a natural progression after it started selling 3rd Party products alongside it’s own identical products nearly 20 years ago.

None of us are totally immune to Marketing/Advertising/Propaganda.

I would agree that Amazon’s product recommendations for me are terrible, with the exception of Kindle books.

I’m currently purchasing Kindle books at a rate 3-5x faster than I can read them!

I actually support a 3rd online advertising option as Google AdWords and FB advertising costs can be quite steep with declining bang for buck.

Disclosure: used to work for Amazon in the prehistoric age.

Is this news?

It was news in 2012! Now it's more olds than news.

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