Amazon taking a page out of Facebook and Google end-user privacy (or lackthereof) playbook ?

While searching for an old demo video i posted a few years ago on Google, i was surprised to find a link with my name to an Amazon profile (here is the version after I went and reconfigured it not to show everything to everyone – https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AKGAI3T42AEEK?ie=UTF8&responseType=info&responseCode=ups). One click is all it took to discover that Amazon has decided that my Address, Birthday, Anniversary and other private information was now on a public profile that I never even knew existed. It seems like more and more service providers feel comfortable to err on the public side of the privacy equation when it comes to end-user data. Looking further into the matter, you need to explicitly choose to opt-out of having you data public in your amazon account or else it’s all going to be out there. I personally used the wish-list function on amazon as a place to remind me of the stuff I might want to buy but not right now and so it could easily have contained stuff I did not want out there like the book I was looking to help me fix my horrible hand-writing. Seems like a periodic self-google check is in place (beyond the obvious vanity reasons..), you never know what data of yours has decided to become “social” on its own.

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