Can Amazon and my Bank communicate?

So this started to come to my attention after two transactions, and after the third, I’ve sworn of using my credit/debit card or amazon.com. About 2 months ago I purchased a Tool CD and a few days later bought a PSP game Tekken6. Nothing special right? A few days pass I hop onto amazon.com (which has my credit/debit card saved, an logs in automatically when I go there) and it gives me suggestions for the rest of the Tool CD’s I didn’t buy, and a suggestion for Tekken6 for the PlayStation 3! So now I’m curious, I write if off as I forgot I was looking for these items days prior and I had lapsing issues!? Went and bought Dexter Season 5 a few days ago at Walmart…guess what, the other seasons are suggested for me on amazon, and I know I’ve never looked for it! Does this really happen, or am I special? :wink: It feels too big brothery…hell, I remember when an ad could tell me what town I lived in, that kinda freaked me out back in the day. Should I continue not using my bank card, or what?

It has nothing to do with your bank info. It has to do with your searches and purchases.

Sounds solid, except I’ve never searched for Dexter, hell, I’ve never typed it on a computer since today. I guess with no other suggestions I’ll defer to your answer. I’ll just chalk it up to me thinking everyone is out to get me. :wink:

Think of how Pandora works. You like a certain artist, they suggest similar artists and play it for you. Advertising (especially online) is the same way. You know how if you go to a grocery store and buy Brand X of granola bars, you get a coupon for Brand Q granola bars for 50 cents off? :slight_smile:

They know what you do buy (from Amazon), and they know what sort of things are bought by other people who buy the stuff that you buy, so they (or, rather, their computer) guess that you might like those other things too. If you ever click on Amazon (or Amazon affiliate) ads online, even without buying, they may also know about that, and, of course they know what you (and customers like you) search for on Amazon too. The guesses are not always good, but yes, sometimes they are, and it can seem a bit creepy. It has nothing to do with your bank or credit card though, just your Amazon account itself.

Yes, they are out to get you, or your money, at any rate, but they can’t do more than suggest (so far!).

Quite.

The Amazon “suggestions” page uses some computer logic to decide what to present to you. It’s presumably based on your past purchases, and probably the past purchases of others who’ve bought the same things you did. I’m pretty sure it also considers things you looked at but didn’t buy.

Your bank knows that you spent some money at WalMart, but it doesn’t know what you spent it on.

And your bank certainly isn’t sharing any specific details with Amazon about transactions at merchants not named Amazon.

However, the card association will sell aggregated data on consumer spending habits to retailers and others.

It can get pretty spooky. I remember when I got a recommendation for an artist I love, who had a new CD of a particular type of music. The only thing was, I hadn’t bought or even searched for this artist online, since the last time she’d produced a CD of that type of music was back in 1988, when I’d bought it in a store. I couldn’t figure out how they knew that this was exactly the CD that I would want. A little investigation revealed that it was probably the other music I’d bought or searched for in similar genres. It still felt weird though – like, “Hey, we know you used to buy her CDs at Tower Records in the 80’s; would you like to order this new one?”

Like a lot of “spooky” things, it seems more meaningful than it actually is. They make a lucky guess every now and then, based on what they do know of your Amazon buying/browsing habits. It seems cleverer than it is because we only pay attention to the times when they get it right.

Instead, pay attention to all the wrong suggestions they make. You’ll soon notice that for every spot-on correct suggestion, there are a dozen that range from kind-of to no-way.

It’s exactly the same process that convinces people to believe in “psychics” - the occasional lucky guess based on observation seems meaningful because we disregard all the other inaccurate guesses.

I just look at why they recommended it. Even when the recommendation seems weird, I look at it, and it makes perfect sense.

It’s like Akinator. It may seem like it’s psychic, but, when you look at all the data points, it makes perfect sense.

Thanks for the responses, guess I’ll take off my tin foil hat…for now.

Last I checked, when Amazon recommends something to you, there’s a little button or something somewhere that says “Why was I recommended this?”. Click it, and it’ll say “Because you bought X, looked at Y, and told us you already owned Z”. These won’t necessarily be things by the same artist, but they might be similar genre, or otherwise connected to what you were recommended.

This kind of thing will happen all the time. Many movie suggestions on Amazon.com are for movies I’ve already own or DVD box sets I’ve already purchased, meaning that sometimes Amazon is doing a good job of taking my searches and prior purchases and predicting something.

But if you really pay attention to how many suggestions are just totally off the wall, it’ll seem a lot less mysterious that they occasionally do things like this.

The question is: do Amazon and Walmart talk to each other about sales data? I doubt it, since they would be competitors, but I wouldn’t rule it out. You should look at both their privacy policies. Your bank is pretty much irrelevant, since it doesn’t know what you bought from either.

Suppose neither even had a “privacy policy.” (After all, if you walk into Walmart and use any kind of plastic with your name and some kind of number on it, they’re not going to shove a policy in front of you so you can read it before buying anything. It’s not going to occur to most people to even ask.) They might be competing with other stores, but it might nevertheless be to their advantage to contribute data to a broker that shares data with other stores anyway.

The other possibility is that some sort of ad banner system has its own cookie/tracking system and is following everything you do. Check the security level for cookies.

I read a new thriller last year about a psycho killer who sent thousands of letters to people telling them to think of a number and then open another inner envelope, which had a number written on it. The number was always the same. Only a few people thought of the number that was written down, but boy did it freak them out.

Same idea here.

True, but the suggestion algorithms perform better than simple blind guessing. They’re still far from perfect though. To be hypothetical, say that some retailer sells 10 things, and you want one at random. If they suggest randomly, they’ll be right 10% of the time. But with their suggestion algorithm and your history, they can improve that to maybe 20% or 30%. Most of the time the suggestions are still crap, but they can still increase their sales if you even occasionally buy something based on the relatively infrequent “hits”.

In the Netflix challenge, the best applied statisticians in the world only managed to improve the accuracy from “a few percent” to “a few percent plus another one or two percent”.

You are right, I didn’t consider a third party party vendor who collects sales data from clients and shares it among them. It is possible, though again I haven’t heard of such a company. Most likely the data would not include CC numbers because that would open them up to enormous liability.

It could be the same tech that ads use to show relevant (sometimes wildly inappropriate) ads based on the keywords on the page. You open a page with “Dexter” on it, and get bombarded with banner and sidebar ads for Dexter DVDs and the children’s boy-scientist cartoons. If that system also stores your IP address and content, and shares it with customers like Amazon, or Expedia, or est Buy - then every time you browse a web page you are building a “preferences” profile for yourself. Read politics stories in the newspaper, expect lots of political ads. Read technical stuff, expect computer ads. and so on…