Amazon’s About You page turned one leggings order into ‘has flat buttocks’

Amazon keeps a page that spells out what its systems have concluded about you, and for one shopper the conclusion was “has flat buttocks.” The line sat in her About You profile, most likely produced by an order for scrunch-butt leggings, a few rows away from notes about parties she had hosted and products she owned. Her screenshot on Threads passed a million views within a day and sent thousands of people to look up their own accounts.

What they found is the machinery behind every “recommended for you” shelf, written out in plain sentences. The About You hub turns purchases, searches, product reviews, saved lists and chats with the Alexa for Shopping assistant into short statements about who you are, filed under headings such as Product Preferences, Interests & Hobbies and Home & Family. Those statements decide which products, deals and suggestions Amazon puts in front of you.

Plenty of the entries are dull. “Shops from women’s departments.” “Probably owns a Shark robot vacuum.” “Reads diverse non-fiction.” Others read like a stranger guessing at your private life: people replying to the original post reported lines including “husband has skinny legs,” “cusses when scared” and “likes brunettes with muscles.” None of these were typed in by the customer. Each one is a label inferred from a pattern of orders.

A recommendation engine does not need to know why you bought shaping leggings. It needs a tag it can match against other products, and the cheapest tag is a claim about the buyer. So the profile drifts from what you shop for to what your body, your partner and your temper are supposedly like. A gift for a friend, a purchase for a spouse or a one-off joke order can harden into a fact about the account holder.

Checking your own list takes under a minute. In the Amazon Shopping app, open the menu, go to Account, then Shopping preferences, then About You. On a computer, the same page sits inside Your Account, in the shopping preferences section. Amazon says customers can also ask Alexa for Shopping “What do you know about me?” and update details from there.

The controls are narrower than they look. Amazon lets you correct an entry, give feedback on it or remove information you do not want used for personalization. That promise covers what the store shows you. It does not say the purchase history behind a guess is deleted, or that the label stops shaping advertising elsewhere in Amazon’s business, and nothing on the page tells you whether it lists every inference the company holds or only the ones it chooses to display. Deleting “has flat buttocks” removes a sentence. The order that produced it is still on file.

The hub is still labelled a beta, and the screenshots circulating so far come from accounts on Amazon’s US store. Amazon has not said whether shoppers in Europe, India, Japan or Latin America see the same page. Customers in the European Union and the UK already have a wider tool under data-protection law: they can ask Amazon for a copy of all the personal data it holds on them, which goes well beyond a curated list of personality notes.

Amazon introduced About You in May, and the Threads post that turned it into a talking point spread in the first week of October, just as the company’s October Prime Big Deal Days sale pushed a fresh wave of orders into the same system. Amazon has not said when the beta ends, or whether the page will ever show which purchase produced each conclusion. Every order placed during the sale is raw material for the next line.

Tags: amazon, privacy, online shopping, Alexa for Shopping, Amazon About You, personalization