Amazon's About You is a big pearl-clutching topic on the Internet today. You have nobody but yourself to blame for giving them this data, and it is a reminder that big tech is monitoring your habits and preferences.
As the tech revolution has progressed, one of the persistent issues is one of personal privacy.
Your information is absolutely being used by companies to extract as much value and money from you as possible. There has been a lot of pushback from critics and privacy advocates, but there's also the mass acceptance that it will always happen in some way.
It is trivial for a company to acquire your information and know some basic details like your name, date of birth, and address, because they require it for sign-up and shipping. Some tech companies are positioned in a way to get a lot more information than you may think.
Retail info scraping
As the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon derives a ton of information about its users. Partly from information you give to actually place your orders, partly from the orders themselves.
In May 2026, Amazon promoted its About You page. That page can be used to view and edit details it has about you, based on your shopping and browsing habits.
This is all done using a combination of your purchase history, conversations with Alexa for Shopping, product reviews, lists, and searches. The intention of the page is to let users correct mistakes Amazon has made, or to try and stop it from recommending specific types of products repeatedly.
Because of this, if you're regularly buying diet supplements, you're going to get recommended more supplements. You're also bound to see that type of product mentioned in the list too.
However, if you're not interested in a specific hobby anymore, or a major life event has occurred, you'd want to make changes there too. For example, if a pet cat has passed on, the last thing you want is Tibbles' favorite cat food recommended to you.
To Amazon, getting these preferences is "fundamental to providing you with high-quality, relevant recommendations." You could continue that sentence with "that you will be tempted to give us money for."
What Amazon "knows"
The About You page is accessed by the main website by hovering over your name, then clicking the pop-up of your name, then clicking About You.
It's also available in the Amazon Shopping app, again by looking at your account and profile.
The About You page lists different departments you frequently visit, along with brands and other insights about your life, all based on topics it has encountered.
Some of the "insightful" shopping habits that Amazon knows about this writer.
A lot of this is obvious, such as brands that you've bought before, as well as if you have a cat or dog, and if the profile "Appears to own Apple devices."
It'll remember that you have visited the cheese section for groceries in the past, that you have bought Ugreen USB accessories, and that your cat prefers Felix.
I apparently favor "premium butter brands."
That said, despite being a regular customer of Amazon for many, many years, it knows surprisingly little. It's only surfaced 38 elements for me, and some of them are not exactly things that should've taken a long time for Amazon's systems to derive, or to be uncertain about.
For example, in this writer's case, Amazon says I "probably" live in a specific city. Which completely ignores the fact that my address in that city is visited by its delivery vans multiple times a month, and has done so for years.
It's right that I have a "systematically built PC gaming setup" and "Builds and uses custom PC systems." But at the same time, why does it think I'm "likely" to own a specific model of drone, which I bought from Amazon in 2024?
I suppose I could have thrown it away since then.
What's more confusing is that Amazon's list in this writer's case consists of findings that have been added on 7 November 2025. Every one of the listings comes up with that date.
It could be because I'm in the UK and not the US, so my profile isn't necessarily going to be as rapidly updated.
But even with the dated listings, it's still demonstrating that Amazon knows a lot about me, and therefore certainly you.
Inescapable tracking
This Amazon page is to edit its knowledge about your shopping habits. It's certainly far from what Amazon really has on file for you.
Still, it is a good demonstration of how granular big tech's data collection can get, given enough access to you.
It's also something you cannot easily get out of, or away from entirely.
"About You" does let users add and remove information from the page, but it's only a temporary measure. You cannot tell Amazon to stop collecting this information on your account at all.
The nearest thing you can do is to shop without an Amazon account. But at that point, Amazon will simply go down the route of monitoring your habits and creating a John Doe profile of preferences and recommend products anyway.
Mac and iPhone users do get some assistance from Apple, thanks to initiatives such as App Tracking Transparency. Apple's escalating crackdown on ad vendors and data brokers will also make a dent on how much personal data gets used on the market, too.
Even with such efforts, there will always be an arms race to collect more information. It's not hard to imagine Alexa being used more for data mining Amazon's users in the future.
Just imagine how much information you may have told ChatGPT, that could be analyzed to come up with other insights.
But ultimately, if you want to buy something from Amazon, you're going to be handing over some form of personal data to the online superstore anyway.
Whether you consciously know about it or not.