I went and looked at order confirmation emails from 2019 and confirmed my memory that back then they didn’t list what items I ordered (but did a few years before). At the time I figured this change was intended to fight against Paribus, a startup that would scan your email and automatically request compensation for late Amazon deliveries.
But then I looked at emails last year and Amazon was sending item names after order again. So it seems like this practice has changed multiple times.
I ascribed it to the likes of Google vacuuming all this data at scale from gmail service -- which Amazon actively wanted to avoid (gifting free data to Google to train on and potentially advertize Amazon-alternatives to via personalized/targetted ads based on purchase patterns and preferences)
I worked at Shopify during this period and their Shop app (the one that helpfully tracks your packages arriving) was a victim of these emails becoming vague.
At the time it felt like a specific reaction to Shopify mining this information to compete. (I have no insider knowledge if they were or were not).
Of course, the answer can be many things -- now it's AI, back then it was 17track, Google, Shopify, etc.
For the sakes of individual humans, who unfortunately don't know everything, I wish some of these things would be gamed out beforehand and mooted without dragging us pawns through the accelerating conflicts of giants. I'm not asking for central planning, just recognition for distributed impacts without waiting three election cycles and forgetting everything again.
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I went and looked at order confirmation emails from 2019 and confirmed my memory that back then they didn’t list what items I ordered (but did a few years before). At the time I figured this change was intended to fight against Paribus, a startup that would scan your email and automatically request compensation for late Amazon deliveries.
But then I looked at emails last year and Amazon was sending item names after order again. So it seems like this practice has changed multiple times.
I ascribed it to the likes of Google vacuuming all this data at scale from gmail service -- which Amazon actively wanted to avoid (gifting free data to Google to train on and potentially advertize Amazon-alternatives to via personalized/targetted ads based on purchase patterns and preferences)
I worked at Shopify during this period and their Shop app (the one that helpfully tracks your packages arriving) was a victim of these emails becoming vague.
At the time it felt like a specific reaction to Shopify mining this information to compete. (I have no insider knowledge if they were or were not).
Of course, the answer can be many things -- now it's AI, back then it was 17track, Google, Shopify, etc.
For the sakes of individual humans, who unfortunately don't know everything, I wish some of these things would be gamed out beforehand and mooted without dragging us pawns through the accelerating conflicts of giants. I'm not asking for central planning, just recognition for distributed impacts without waiting three election cycles and forgetting everything again.