The fact that our shopping habits, browsing habits, reading habits, et cetera get sold to 3rd party spammers gets my blood boiling. I don't honestly know if Amazon sells this information to others, but I do know some of the companies whose goods are sold on Amazon (and via other retail sources) do sell your information when you register their products or use their cloud service. I recently bought an Omron Blood Pressure monitor via Amazon. Within a couple of days of receiving it and registering it and setting up the Omron cloud account to share MY data with MYSELF via various of MY devices, I began getting at least a dozen or more spam emails per day for diet supplements and other "snake oil" garbage. It didn't take me long to put the Omron connection into the equation. I contacted them and had some very harsh words with them and then the spam suddenly began to fade away. Two weeks later I rarely get any of those spam emails.

I rather doubt the culprit in my case was Amazon, but rather Omron. But my point is that too many companies now sell your data to other companies. Some have checkboxes you can uncheck on your account page to help curb the issue, others give you no option to prevent it. Congress recently approved allowing our internet providers to sell our web surfing data. Some say, "Well just don't surf places you don't want people to know you were visiting." But that is naive and ignorant. For me it is more about not getting spam every time you look at grocery items, clothes, or anything else online. I'm pretty sure that if someone followed you around writing down every item you looked at in every store you went into, that would be considered stalking. Yet in the USA it is perfectly legal for companies to sell our shopping and browsing data to pretty much anyone with or without our permission.

Its as if we are nothing but peasants in a kingdom run by oligarchs.