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Amazon Snooping Your Surfing For Targeted Ads?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shoulder-surfing-retailers dept.

Jewfro_Macabbi writes, "Recently after browsing major online retailers for Bluetooth adapters, I went to Amazon.com to find front-page ads for, you guessed it, Bluetooth adapters. Disable cookies, the ads go away; re-enable cookies and the ads re-appear. The EULA is ambiguous as usual. Try it for yourself and see."

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. not the same experience by yagu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I too tried to shop for bluetooth devices at a major online retailer... then I went to Amazon.com. Not a single reference anywhere to any bluetooth devices. For me the experiment ends there. I had cookies turned on (always do), and was logged into both sites with an account login.

    Aren't "other" cookies supposed to be invisible to a domain application? I thought so. So, is there a possibility you are surfing at some retailer that has a partnership of some kind with amazon (many do), and hence the information is shared in a partnership, but not across the proscribed browser boundaries?

  2. Known issue by XanC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He's not claiming Amazon hacked his browser. It's been known for ages that if two sites both use the same ad company to display ads, that your activity on both sites can be linked. He's saying Amazon is using these data to target ads on their front page.

  3. Re:How long did it take you? by cuban321 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah cause you know... AT&T couldn't just be their upstream provider or anything. /tinfoil

  4. Re:How long did it take you? by cuban321 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (Offtopic, but oh well I couldn't resist)

    You seem to have a lack of understanding about how the Internet works. I go through qwest to get to /.-- that doesn't mean qwest is "sniffing" my traffic. It simply means qwest is a provider who is peered with speakeasy (my ISP) and savvis (apparently Slashdots' provider).

    Do you really think the NSA wouldn't use transparent ethernet taps anyways? And do you really think the NSA would have all that traffic dumped back to "nsa.gov"?