The article clearly acknowledges this:
> Given Amazon’s obsession with speed and eliminating friction to foster faster consumerism, the dawdling data solicitation process seems like it just might be intentional, designed to dissuade requests. A far simpler explanation comes through an invocation of Hanlon’s razor, the old adage to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Amazon whistleblowers cited by Politico have said that the company “has a poor grasp of what data it has, where it is stored and who has access to it.” If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that it can take a month or more for Amazon to process a data request. As former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon succinctly put it in an interview with Reveal, “we have no fucking idea where our data is.”
However, there are many dark patterns here unrelated to how long it took:
- Repeatedly trying to direct users away from a data request to their "Your Account" page, which has a tiny fraction of your data
- 6+ different pages and many many clicks required to make a request
- Data divided into ~100 different downloads (how many more days would it have taken to make one zip?)
Also, Amazon is an ad company. They have well-designed APIs and and tools for managing all this data because it's how they make money. When an advertiser accesses your data, they don't have to manually download 74 different zips.