Did Amazon spy on me? I had a creepy experience today

Communities Blog
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I think this is in the right category, i'm sorry if not

I had a very creepy experience with Amazon today.

So this morning before I went to school, I remembered that 4th period that I have to do a small book talk for a few minutes, so I randomly grabbed a book from my house that I have read in the past, that book was the 1st Harry Potter book.

So then later on when 4th period came, I had my book talk and I talked about Harry Potter and the sorcerers stone for like 3 minutes and was done.

Then after school I came home and I went onto my computer to check where my orders were on Amazon. So when I went to Amazon, I was on the home page and I noticed something strange, it was reccomeneding me purchases of a ton of harry potter books. I thought this was very odd because it has literally never even reccomended for me to buy any sort of book, but then out of nowhere today it starts to show the book I talked about at school. I did not search anything about harry potter, or any book at all, not in amazon, not in google.

I then looked at the bottom of the page where it shows recently viewed items, and it showed that I viewed the harry potter book, I never click on one, let alone even searched for it.

I do have the amazon app, and it does have a mic and photo feature on it. Do you think its possible it heard the word "harry potter" a lot and started to show reccomendations for it?

I didn't think of any possibility of spying until I realized I literally searched nothing about books or even harry potter on any sort of device, I only talked about it.

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For the sake of my sanity I hope you're wrong and something else triggered it.

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i hope i am too. i was skeptical, but then i became suspicious when i searched literally nothing about books, nor harry potter online on any of my devices. i only talked about it, I did say "harry potter" a lot in a 3 minute span.

again, it has literally never even reccomended me to buy a book.....

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here is the screenshot of amazon "more items to consider", it scrolls to the right several pages and it is all harry potter related, nothing else

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Does the Amazon app have permission to access your microphone? Should say if it does or not in Google play.

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according to my settings (ios) amazon has access to my camera, and im pretty positive that when they first added that "scan an item with camera" feature, i opened it and it asked to acess my mic and camera, and i allowed it

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Ah ios my bad. Well if you allowed it in permissions its possible this could be happening. Isn't the phone always listening anyways for siri? (Not too familiar with iphones)

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Have you tried triggering it intentionally? You could say the name of another book over and over and put it in view of your phone's camera and see if it happens again.

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wow... this is very intriguing... It's possible they are farming your mic for keywords. It seems like if they were doing that somebody wouldn't noticed before now, yet perhaps this is a more recent development?

I second @ceres's idea, try to trigger it yourself but pick something more obscure than the world's number one selling fictional story.

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The far more likely scenario is you looked up harry potter at some point and just don't remember.

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Agree with that.
If you dont clear your internet cookies and search history and shit.
Shops like Amazon etc store tracking cookies on your device, so they could get the information from there.

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probably data mining 101:
Qain mentioned harry potter on air the other day, maybe it's popular with the members of this community recently, and amazon can infer you're interested in the same stuff as members of the this community by the stuff you might have looked up on amazon earlier. You don't have to be directly associated with any members of this community for amazon to know you belong to this community, knowing that you're generally interested in the same kind of stuff is enough for a recommendation engine to draw a correlation that you might be interested in the same kind of things as other people interested in similar things.

Also, it's a popular book. .. you need something a lot more obscure to make those inferences.
Checkout http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 for an example of how to prove these things in a statistically significant way.

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Or someone played a not-very-elaborate prank on you. If it was really in "recently viewed" and not "suggested items" then it must have been viewed. Amazon has no reason to put stuff you didn't view in that list. If they want to bring something to your attention, they have far less alienating ways to do it.

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Amazon is just a store. It doesn't have a mic on feature or any of the sort. And on the actual app itself. If you found a harry potter book on the "Recently Viewed Items" List. That means you viewed it. Nothing more, nothing less. Maybe you were browsing through some books and clicked on harry potter and forgot about it.

Amazon isn't like facebook where, whatever you viewed on other sites just magically ends up as an advertisement on the page. It was viewed at some point.

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I'd be interested if you could repeat with some other (but random) product. Then going back online to see if you are served ads on that product.

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This seems highly likely..

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I just checked the settings for my amazon app on android. It says that it has permission to mic and camera, but also that it had never used them. Maybe they tried out a prototype feature on iphone or something.

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Well they do ha e that amamzon house thing that is always listening. Not directly related but if they are testing or rolling out this so other places this could be the start of it note this EXTREME SPECULATION ÀT BEST, but a thought all the same.

I would put it down to recent events with Alan Rickman and an uptick in axon sales of the books so they are pushing them again.