Amazon has detailed records of the information you have provided about yourself over the years. Although there isn’t one master list of all of the data Amazon has accumulated about you, it is possible to find it all. Use this guide compiled by CNBC to find out what Amazon knows about you, including all of your Amazon orders, your browsing history, your wish lists of items you hoped or planned to purchase, the songs you have played on Amazon Music, files you have stored on Amazon Drive, everything you have asked Alexa and much more.
As an Amazon customer, you have a profile that is publicly shared. It doesn’t include your purchases or browsing history, but it does include your biographical information as well as reviews and comments you have posted to Amazon. Your Shopping Lists and Wish Lists are also public. You can control what others can see in your profile by:
- Sign-in to your Amazon account, then click Account and Lists.
- Under Ordering and shopping preferences, click Your Amazon profile.
- Click the orange box marked Edit your public profile.
- Here, you’ll see Edit public profile and Edit privacy settings.
Take a good look around and choose the options you want to modify. You can also make your lists private, view your profile as a stranger would see it and stop Amazon from tracking your browsing.
As Amazon adds more services, they capture more data. Amazon’s Ring cameras are always watching, and Amazon encourages networking them with your neighbors for better neighborhood surveillance. They also want to use Ring and Echo devices to share your Internet connection with your neighbors through a program they call Sidewalk.
With Sidewalk, your Ring and Echo devices become bridge devices to extend WiFi from your router, potentially by as much as a mile. In doing so, Sidewalk uses a portion of your internet bandwidth to pass signals across all of these connected devices. Amazon says the amount of data used is no more than 500MB per account per month, about the same as you would use in streaming 10 minutes of HD video. That’s not much data, but…
What about the fact that your network is now attached to multiple smart devices that you do not control? Security is not always strong on the Internet of Things, and you may be opening your network to attack by hackers.
To opt out of Sidewalk, sign-in to the Alexa app in your Amazon account. Then tap More followed by Settings. Tap Account Settings then Amazon Sidewalk. There you have the option to turn Amazon Sidewalk off.
Oh, and did you know that Alexa has stored a recording of everything you said to her, um, it. Does the thought of that give you the creeps? You can delete all of these recordings. Go to https://www.amazon.com/mycd then choose Alexa and More actions. From there you can delete all voice recordings.
