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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information.

Clearly a customer focused decision.

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For those saying it’s to protect you from Google’s surveillance, I’ll say a couple things:

1. It redacts emails even to my personal domain.

2. Multiple Amazon reps have told me this is a common customer complaint and there’s no way to opt out of it. If it really were altruistic, Amazon would let you opt out.

PS: maybe I’m not in the loop yet but the first item I checked shows at least a hundred customer reviews on some sort of infinite scroll.

For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.

Likely to prevent google from collecting shopping habit signals to sell ads targeting to.

It used to be the case with Amazon India. Now my Gmail shows my fish food will arrive in 2 days.

This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.

This also frustrates me, I vibe-coded [0] a chrome extension that reads the data from Amazon's website (read orders and purchases, which are different things...) and then matches them against the YNAB entries and then updates the memo line in YNAB with the name of the item(s) (after running the item name through a small LLM, haiku, to clean up amazon-speak into something reasonable).

This has been working well for me overall.

It's not open source (or paid), it's just for me and I'm not looking to maintain or support it but it should be easy to replicate. It does require I go to Amazon on my desktop and click the extension and tell it to "Sync" but that's easy enough and it makes my budgeting way easier.

[0] I did this over 1.5 years ago (Jan 2025) so it's probably even easier now, I wrote it with Aider and it cost $27.81 in API credits (this was before Claude Code/coding subscriptions). The only reason I know the cost so exactly is that I had started to write a blog post about it but abandoned it.

Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.

your credit card bills are super heavily data mined. I think what they're doing is fine.

Someone explained how it relates to their AI shopping plans. Don't actually remember how.

I remember reading they actively prevent AI agents from using their site or being able to track purchases. So congratulations, the uselessness for tracking is the point.

This is to protect their data on you. E-mailing you specifics is handing your purchase history directly to Google and Microsoft (at least for the 90% of the population that use Gmail/Outlook). They would rather sell that than give it away for free.

Oh I know why they did it. I am still furious that I am yet again getting a worse experience.

That shouldn't be Amazon's unilateral decision to make, though. They could have made that behavior optional, and if they were truly as Customer-Obsessed as they used to be, they would have (and they would also have observed that customers did not like the new behavior and reacted to that accordingly).

I think you are getting downvoted for speaking truth because of first sentence which should be changed to "This is to MOAT their data on you". "protection" is invalid word.

Protection is the correct word. I said to "protect their data", not "protect your data", which conveys the same thing as your proposed correction without being grammatically incorrect. Moat is not a verb.

Actually moat can most certainly be used as a verb. Ex They planned to moat the fortress for extra security.

No, sorry, this is a positive change that was overdue for years. Gmail (and likely other email providers) was scraping the contents of the email to build a list of your purchases and it was not possible to delete items or clear it.

What's the purpose of the emails then?

By this logic, nothing can ever be shared by email. Else someone (user included) might scrape some value from it.

If it is truly for my benefit, they could let me opt in or out of the behavior. I truly derive value from being able to search the local copy of my email to track purchases.

It’s my choice to use (or not use) Gmail. What data I share with them in exchange for their service is non of Amazon’s business. (If Amazon wanted to make this feature opt-in, sure, whatever.)

I host my own email and I think this change sucks

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