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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

Consider the flip side of the coin. The money from Amazon gives Canonical the ability to employ more developers, improve Ubuntu and add features faster, etc.

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At the cost of privacy? No thanks, instead I will gladly donate to Canonical. Sending it to Amazon doesn't help either. Amazon is the Google of shopping. The more data they have, the better they can guess as to what you want. Search for X on Amazon while logged in and the next day you will receive an email recommending similar items. They have also admitted to storing your watching habits. Every play, pause, rewind and fast-forward is logged while watching a prime video. The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.

> The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.

Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.

The phrase you're looking is diminishing marginal returns. You hit the behavioral nail on the head with this analysis!

Well, sqrt(x) has diminishing marginal returns, but it's still unbounded. I'm pretty sure there's a hard limit to how good recommendations can get at all (think more like arctan(x)).

Why is it so terrible that Amazon know your shopping habits? Honest question. I've heard of cases where Amazon knew a woman was pregnant before her family and such things but I can't think of anything that would apply to most people that would be bad and come from Amazon knowing your shopping habits. Heck, even you yourself make a good case for why it's helpful for them to do so.

Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy, knowing it'd be rare for it to have a negative effect on them. And I'm not saying that's bad or knocking it. I'm just trying to get a sense of why this is so distasteful. I've never seen an Amazon result when I search using the latest Ubuntu by the way. Then again, I'm only searching for applications or files on my machine. I've also never seen an ad on my desktop. I know these things exsits but don't know why I'm not seeing them.

> Why is it so terrible that Amazon know your shopping habits? Honest question... I can't think of anything that would apply to most people that would be bad and come from Amazon knowing your shopping habits.

I think you are putting the onus on the wrong party.

It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Amazon might be nefarious or incompetent with my data, or in which they may share my data with another party who is. However, I don't need to demonstrate that these scenarios are likely in order for me to desire privacy: If I am merely undecided about who I want to share my data with, then the rational thing for me to do is to not share my data.

To my mind, it seems immoral to release a product that shares search data by default and without notice.

> Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy...

Absolutely. Are "matters of philosophy" a poor way to inform actions?

In my experience, you will enjoy life more if you think along the lines of "what's the worst that could happen?" Otherwise there's too many things to worry about or be unhappy about.

Amazon might even knowingly share some of your shopping habits with some organization you don't want them to, but what's the worst that could happen? Is it worse than the effort you'd put into ensuring that doesn't happen?

If you can't imagine anything bad happening, you lack imagination.

Assume Amazon will lose your data. Assume everyone else (facebook, twitter, g+, flickr) will lose your data, give them up -- or that they are already public.

Assume someone will correlate all that data, and sell it as a black market service to allow anyone to track you, see if you're in or out of your house, assume your government will put you on a no fly list if you're buying books on military tactics, left/right wing political opinion, assume your government will become oppressive in 15 years and mark up all your kids for "special attention" based on your shopping habits today etc etc...