Through a promotion for new Amazon Assistant installations, Amazon is offering a $10 credit to U.S. Prime Day consumers who allow the company to track the websites they browse.
Amazon Assistant fetches the price of Amazon products and displays it to users on Target’s and Walmart’s websites, among other places, Reuters reported.
The data can potentially provide the retailer with insights into how to hone marketing strategies and stamp out rivals. Electronic Frontier Foundation Technologist Bennett Cyphers said, according to the report, “This data is often used for training machine learning models to do better ad targeting. But in the U.S., there aren’t really restrictions on what you can do with this kind of data.”
An Amazon spokesperson said that “customer trust is paramount to Amazon, and we take customer privacy very seriously.” The official pointed out that the practice is in compliance with the Assistant’s privacy policy, which says data collection is for websites that users visit “where we may have relevant product or service recommendations.”
The eCommerce retailer has over seven million shoppers tapping into its Assistant through Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, per data published via web browsers. Although other firms offer similar tools for shopping, Amazon’s tool combination “still pales in comparison to data collection by Alphabet Inc’s Google,” per the report.
Last year, the retailer offered a $5 discount to new Amazon Assistant users who spent a minimum of $25 for Prime Day. This year, it offered a $10 discount for shoppers spending a minimum of $50.
Analysts predict that this year’s Prime Day has the possibility to be Amazon’s largest-ever sales day. This comes one year after the online retailer brought on more members to its Prime service in its history on the first day of the event, despite a rise in annual membership fees from $99 to $119.
