Tom Dacon wrote:
Well, since you brought it up, what don't you like about their
privacy policy?
I am not familiar with it, but I have been satisfied with their
prices and service.
I'm learning to be wary of 3rd party sellers.

Bill

Well, Bill, their basic policy is "whatever we find out from you, we
own, like it or not, and we can use it any way we like".

This is true of every business including the mom and pop grocery store down
on the corner. If you don't want other people to know things about you then
you're screwed. It's the 21st century and simply by existing you're in a
bunch of databases. And not even offing yourself will get you out of them.

And it really creeps me out the way their tentacles spread out
through the internet. I'll be browsing on some site, Amazon far from
my mind and no evidence whatsoever that the site I'm on is affiliated
with Amazon, and before you know it Amazon will be giving me buying
suggestions based on products that I browsed on that
apparently-unrelated site.

Can you give an example of this occurring and show us the evidence that
Amazon obtained information from this "apparently-unrelated site"?

Give me the willies.

I used to buy tools from an online outfit called Toolcrib or
something like that. Amazon bought them outright and integrated them
into their site back when they were aggressively expanding into other
lines of business besides books.

That's news to Toolcrib.

I bought a couple of things in the
tool line from them, but I soured on them pretty quickly when I
started reading about their privacy policies. But sometimes when
you're doing a search on something the Amazon link is the
best-looking one, and like I say, when I go there it really creeps me
out to find them popping up with their damned buying suggestions.

Why does it "creep you out" that they're making suggestions based on what
you've purchased or browsed on their site? If it really upsets you that
much there is a very simple thing that you can do about it. When you are
done placing an order with Amazon then LOG OUT OF THEIR SITE.