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> I would get upset is if Amazon sold that data to Google to show me 'relevant ads'

If the email account you use for Amazon is a Gmail account they email a receipt of purchase to that account, which Google will use for 'relevant ads'.

But of course in that case you are expressly granting permission for Amazon to contact google. If it was done via a TOS agreement or something then yes I agree, that would be concerning.

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Even then, that's more a problem with google than amazon. Or, more accurately, it's a problem that we treat email as electronic mail. We feel we own the account like we own our address, Heck, for some stupid reason we use them for identification all over the internet.

But technologically, they are postcards sent to a business. And we just visit the business to pick up our postcards. Imagine every time you bought something, they sent the receipt to walmart for you to pick up. Not in an envelope, just handed to the guy at the counter and put into a box for you. We never should have let email get this far, but we did.

Supposedly that's no longer the case:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

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