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Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com

153 points · 162 comments · simianwords

z0r · 1790013511 · focus · HN ↗
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
1. bflesch · 1790014266 · focus · HN ↗
  We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
  1. z0r · 1790014705 · focus · HN ↗
    But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
    bflesch · 1790017932 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me?
    The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it.
    They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data.
    Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages.
    In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
    cmpxchg8b · 1790018993 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not Amazon’s place to police this at all.

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