I got an email from Amazon today about their huge selection of Crocs. I've received emails from Amazon before, but this email caught my attention. First, the email states, "Based on your previous purchases in Apparel, we thought you might be interested in our huge selection of Crocs at great prices." Very odd because my wife and I have never purchased apparel from Amazon. We have purchased books, dvd's, and cd's from Amazon, but no clothes or shoes.
A day or two ago, I was looking at some photos on flickr. There were some comments about Crocs on one of the photos. At the time, I thought Crocs was a brand of clothing. I can see now from the Amazon email that Crocs are actually shoes. Until this week, I have never heard of Crocs — other than being short for crocodiles. So when I got the Crocs email from Amazon, I thought this can't be a coincidence. At first I thought flickr was sharing my data with Amazon. Then I remembered I have the Alexa toolbar installed and Amazon owns Alexa. Hmmm, is Alexa sharing my info with Amazon?
I took a look at the Alexa's Privacy Policy. Alexa does mention that it does share information with Amazon when you use the search feature of their toolbar. However, I didn't use the search feature. According to Alexa's privacy policy, they don't share users' identities:
We provide "stripped" usage path information, demographic information, and shopping path information to Amazon.com, researchers, and other third parties. They use it to prepare analyses of aggregate Web patterns and trends. Such analyses are used in research and commercial reports. Before providing the usage path information, we "strip" from the URLs a portion of your IP address and the information that appears after the "?," with limited exceptions for certain types of search terms, leading "search engine" websites, and many e-commerce websites. Before providing the shopping path information to any third party, we strip a portion of your IP address from the data string.
Although this process effectively eliminates most, but not all, personally identifiable information collected during use of the Toolbar Service, we require Amazon.com and other third parties to abide by our practice of not attempting to use such information to determine users' identities.
According to the policy, Alexa doesn't provide users' identities to Amazon and Amazon isn't suppose to determine users' identities. So, why would I get a Crocs email from Amazon just 1-2 days after I saw something about Crocs on the web? Maybe this is just one gigantic coincidence, but something smells fishy here.
