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Comment by croh | Hacker News Reader

Why isnt it possible to delete amazon account permanently ? Amazon still doesn't give option to delete purchase history which is kind of super annoying.

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I think Amazon is actually a different story to a certain extent. Sure, you can delete your account, but at the end of the day you've transacted with them and they can keep a record of who they've transacted with, right? Personally I think it would be unreasonable for me to demand that a shop I buy from delete the record of who purchased it.

> I think it would be unreasonable for me to demand that a shop I buy from delete the record of who purchased it.

Why ? for recent transaction, they need to keep it for tax purposes but they have no legal need to keep old records.

In some countries, they need to keep it for 10 years for tax and audit reasons.

I wouldn't call 10 years "recent transactions". Heck, for most of the online shops, it's more like "forever".

Which countries?

I don't think "need" matters here. They have a record of a transaction, and they want to keep that record. I don't think I have a right to demand that they delete that data.

The GDPR/CCPA/etc. likely has different requirements here, and probably requires deletion after they're no longer needed (for tax purposes or whatever).

But I personally have financial records going back decades, so I can't fault a company for wanting to do the same thing.

Also at least in the EU you're legally mandated to keep transaction history along with customer information for some number of years iirc. Don't know how that combines with gdpr.

Actually the GDPR is very clear about this.[0] Instead of setting an arbitrary limit, it says it should be the shortest period necessary in the context of other laws and requirements. So if you need to keep the records for 5 years for tax reasons, you should delete them after 5 years.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Yes, and one of the cost of the implementation was actually the justification of keeping data, and segregating said data. We had some data we could keep 10 years, some (most) only two, some had to be deleted once the client left.

Thanks for clarifying + supplying references :)

Because Amazon still has to have a record of the purchase. It's part of routine recordkeeping laws while running a business.

They could unlink it from your purchase history, but they would still have to maintain the record of the purchase. I believe this is effectively what 'Archiving' order does.

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