​I’ve seen what Amazon thinks about me – and it revealed a depressing truth | Emma Beddington

There’s been a disturbing development in the surveillance capitalism space for me and other Amazon users: we can now find out exactly what the site thinks about us. The tax-agnostic shopping behemoth launched an “About You” function, which allows shoppers to see what assumptions and beliefs it has gathered from our purchases, in May, but last week things got interesting. Threads user Megan Montgomery found her “About You” page, and discovered Amazon thinks she “has flat buttocks”, prompting other shoppers to post the implacably devastating verdicts they uncovered: “husband has skinny legs”; “likes brunettes with muscles”; “cusses when scared”; “cannot keep real plants alive”; “too short to reach into a 40in-deep box” and “treats cats as biological children”. A TikTok user says hers includes “has a bad father”.

By their fruits shall ye know them, if by “fruits” you mean compression socks, shapewear, cat carriers and self-help guides. Obviously, this is bad, but it’s a well-deserved kind of bad – we’ve sacrificed privacy for convenience and this is the result. It’s also bleakly funny, so just as obviously, I was over there like a ferret up a trouser leg to find out what the stuff Amazon has delivered here over the years has caused it to deduce about my household. The results were disappointing. You don’t need a particularly sophisticated algorithm to deduce “likely lives in York”; “feeds wild birds consistently” (not in summer! I follow RSPB guidance!) and “cycles recreationally” (absolutely not, but I live with a multi-bike-owning MAMNILYBOROD – that’s “middle-aged man not in Lycra yet because of risk of divorce”).

There’s a lot our About You page hasn’t noticed or doesn’t consider important either. What about the sprays, mosses and soils that keep the houseplants I inherited from my son alive? I definitely treat the variegated monstera and temperamental calathea “like biological children”. The multipacks of cuttlefish bones and other tortoise ephemera don’t merit a mention and I’m surprised, too, that my husband’s frequent DIY-related purchases don’t feature. He sources enough widgets, pipes and sealant to open a mid-sized B&Q and I feel obscurely insulted on his behalf that all that hitting things with hammers while swearing (sorry, “cussing”) hasn’t made the cut. It would be nice, too, if my many years of Kindle purchases counted for something – I would have enjoyed a complimentary nod to all the dry histories of ideas and dense Russian classics I optimistically download, fancying myself An Intellectual (glossing over the easy novels about relationships I actually read).

Our page isn’t lacking in pretentiousness though: Amazon comments include “values specialized fitness nutrition products”; “maintains premium coffee brewing setup” and “prefers Japanese stationery brands”. If this portrait of our collective purchases were one real person, you could imagine him – it’s definitely a him – mansplaining David Foster Wallace or how, actually, you should eat nigiri sushi with your hands, on a date. Is this who we are, as a household? I hate us.

Really, the thing I hate most about us is that we’re shopping like this at all. What’s the point of taking recycled containers to the organic market, puffed up with my own virtue, when I’m coming home and buying phone chargers and creatine gummies on my phone? Driving, recently, through the vast logistical and petrochemical sprawl that is Rotterdam port after three days clearing my mother-in-law’s flat made me think this more urgently. We accumulate so much stuff over a lifetime, at such heavy environmental cost, only to have to work out how to get rid of it again. Buying from Amazon makes it worse: the company is estimated to have cost the UK £575m in lost tax revenue in 2024, is accused of unsafe and unethical employment practices and is helmed by a man seemingly intent on spending his obscene wealth on sending a flying penis into space.

The most damning thing Amazon knows about me is the simplest: I’m too lazy and disorganised to do without it – it’s the ubiquitous, inevitable, depressing answer for so many little “needs” (wants, really). I resolved to print out and put up a picture of Bezos’s rocket to shame myself into shopping around, but I’m already facing my first challenge: where the hell do I get our weird printer cartridges?