How to Protect Yourself From Amazon’s Data Tracking Software

It’s no secret that Amazon tracks your data for their own gain in marketing towards you, the firm’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels said that the company tries to “collect as much information as possible” so it can provide people with recommendations, and as Wired explains as Amazon has expanded so has its data collection operation. With the recent viral video of a user who found thousands of uncomfortable audio bytes taken from her Amazon Alexa’s it came to Mi-Tokens attention that many of our users may be at risk because of the lack of common knowledge available to protect yourself from conglomerates like Amazon. You can request to access the daya collected by Amazon through Amazons website here. “Personal data about shopping is incredibly sensitive,,” says Carissa Véliz an associate professor at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics as stated in the same Wired article. “It can tell you about a person’s health status, their political tendencies, their sexual practices, and much more. People buy all kinds of things on Amazon, from books and movies to health-related items. Add to that personal data from Alexa, and it gets even more concerning.”

So what exactly is saved by amazon?

-       Every order placed

-       Show you watch on prime

-       Song you listen to on Amazon

-       Every request you make of Alexa is tracked and stored.

o   This includes 

§  Name

§  Addresss

§  Phone number

§  Bank details

§  Age

§  Location

§  Contacts

§  Photographs

§  Playlists

§  Watchlists

§  Wishlissts

§  Voice recordings

§  Wi-fi credentials

§  Credit history information

Now here’s some simple ways to keep your data secured.

1.     Wipe your browser history

a.     More on this here

2.     Delete recordings off of Alexa and Ring

3.     Turn off Amazon showing your personalized ads

4.     Turn off advertising cookies

a.     Allows third parties to collect your information

5.     Turn off your browsing history of Amazon

6.     Lastly, a privacy-browser

a.     The last and most extensive idea to stop amazon from tracking you.

These are all just suggestions, if you dive deeper into the aforementioned sources you will learn that it is almost impossible to delete the data Amazon stores of your personal information, but going the lengths to try and avoid it could prevent your data from being stolen if Amazon’s data ever becomes breached.