Amazon “Recommends”…
I don’t buy much from Amazon these days if I can help it. I’m not sure why, but recently they’ve shifted sides in The Gut from “go to” to “avoid”. I think it’s all the stuff I keep hearing about regarding Alexa eavesdropping and general Facebooky grab-your-data behaviour. Whatever — they’re in The Gut’s bad books, so I’ll just run with it and see how things pan out.
Anyhow, the other day I overrode The Gut and bought something from Amazon regardless of how dirty it made me feel, and then went to tick the box in my purchase history to prevent them using it for future “recommendations”.
I originally found this nearly-hidden “feature” after noticing Amazon’s irritating habit of recommending a bunch of Widgets that were almost identical to the Widget that I’d just bought: Why would I want to buy another? Oh shit — that recommended one is £25 cheaper, and it’s got a Blapper attachment for free? Bollocks.
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So it turns out that if you click on “Improve Your Recommendations” you get a list of all your previous purchases. Each one has a tickbox that you can untick to stop Amazon from using it for recommendations. Maybe that old news to the more net-savvy of you — to me it was a revelation. So I spent an hour unticking each box, one by one. They don’t let you remove them en masse, sadly it’s called “Improve Your Recommendations”, not “Remove Your Recommendations”…
But things have changed recently — the tickbox is now labelled “I prefer” — a preference, which may presumably be ignored — rather than an imperative “don’t use for future recommendations”. I don’t remember the previous wording, but The Gut is telling me that the weasly-worded “I prefer” is new.
“I prefer”…???
No. I insist.
