On the contrary, it's sort of a way to give users more control over their data.

I work for another online retailer and have been involved in discussions about this same topic (order information in emails we send), and the way we looked at it was that:

- Gmail collects this data from emails

- The overwhelming majority of users are unaware of this data collection

- If we included the data in the email, while knowing that Gmail was collecting it and knowing that most users are not aware, that was tantamount to us just willingly handing over the data to Google without the users' consent

Because of this, we asked ourselves if users would likely feel upset with us willingly handing over data to Google without consent, and we decided that yes they would. So we made a trade off to not include that data in emails because we thought that was more important than the hit to UX we would take from making the emails less informative.

Either way we had to make a decision on behalf of our customers and we knew that no matter which one we chose, we knew some portion of users would be unhappy and decided to go with the more privacy-conscious choice.

I think the followup question in these cases is whether consumers can get the data _off_ of the main websites.

I do see a decent argument for companies being a little bit more conservative about what information they put in emails when this kind of information collection is largely invisible to the general public. It's just important to balance that against data silo worries by making it easy for customers to export their data and hook purchase confirmations up to other services that users might actually want to have access.

I'm not convinced Amazon makes these kinds of decisions out of a concern for user privacy (especially since Amazon isn't actually consistent about hiding this information in their emails as far as I can tell), but I'm sure some retailers are.

The context here is Amazon doing that to prevent Google mining that data, not to take away users' control.

I would argue the point is Amazon is doing this to fight Google's mining and neither company has your data/experience in mind.

You're already using their platform to generate the data, I don't understand the problem with also using it to view that data.

Not providing intricate details about your purchases in email is a privacy-enhancing feature, given that probably most of their customers are using gmail.

Emails today work as receipts. I once had an issue with amazon where I bought a hight value item (relative to my usual buying pattern), and they silently cancelled and deleted it. When I contacted support, they first said if it's not in my orders list, then I never ordered it. Then I showed them a screenshot I have taken from my phone previously, with the order number, and they said it was from an account that does not belong to me. It took multiple calls to support over a few hours for them to finally admin that they deleted it.

They can fix their privacy issues on their platform, I want my email receipts.

Except that I can't export that data from amazon easily if I, say, change or delete my account, or just want to run a program on my own data.

Whereas that is pretty easy with any sort of email client.

Yes, you can. Go to https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports and you can generate a report of items, orders, returns, or refunds for a time period you select. It generates a .csv file.

The report contains far more information than you can scrape from their old order emails, including: Date, ID, Title, Category, ASIN/ISBN, UNSPSC, Condition, Seller, List Price, Purchase Price, Quantity, Payment Instrument, Shipping Address, Carrier, and more

Damn, I've been searching for that for a while. It used to be linked from the order history page and isn't anymore. I thought they had removed that feature. It is a bit annoying that I can get a CSV from my bank in under a second, but it takes a few minutes to get an order report for a similar date range from amazon.

They did fully remove it about a year ago. At the time, the official support response was to point people at the GDPR export. Based on my email from when I requested a GDPR style export, that was around 2020-09-15.

It was just in the past week or so that I noticed that it's back.

It's on your main account page under "Download order reports"

I actually export the data from Amazon every year. They have nice CSV reports with all orders and all products, including cost, category, ASIN, etc. I wish there was a way to hook that up into mint.com to auto-categorize Amazon purchases.

I noticed they stopped including product details in emails a few years ago, didn't click until reading it now that they're doing it to prevent data mining. Kind of makes sense if you think about it, but maybe they should have an option for that for people that self-host their e-mail or use privacy-focused providers.

Had everyone not given full access to a worldwide privacy invading operation such as google, it might not have been a problem. You reap what you sow, and HN has sown plenty of Google seeds.