No Longer an Amazon.com Customer

Version 0.95

A few weeks ago I eliminated my Amazon account. It is the last of the MAMANA (formerly FANG) services to go.

Meta (Facebook) c. 2007 - Beacon scandal. Hard to believe execs thought this was a good idea, and if they did what else might they do (turns out, a lot!).

Microsoft c. 2008 - Bought a Macbook Air for iOS dev.¹

Alphabet (Gmail) c. 2013 - Unification of accounts. Ads based on keywords in emails was fine. When you search DuckDuckGo you get ads based on that search. But creating a profile is concerning, even if, as Benedict Evans espouses, it stays internal. Won’t go into detail, except Twitter had an “interests” page and they were way, way off.

Netflix c. 2021 - Missing old account details. Can’t sign up without a phone. Oh well.

Apple c. 2022 (iPhone)/2024 (Macbook Pro) - Switched to GrapheneOS as an experiment. Hella love the fidelity of permission control. Insane to use a device that “promises” privacy when your telemetry is sent to servers and sold constantly. Normies have no idea. Macbook: I was tired of the hardware becoming “obsolete” in just a few years. You can build a billion dollar company with Linux and an i3.

Amazon c. 2025 - Leaning Authoritarian

I realized that I’m not only an early adopter of technology but an early adopter of banning companies with bad policy. The problem is, most people have no idea about these policies and even fewer care. You’d probably have to hand-hold and explain how you are tracked by iOS apps even if you have the “Don’t Track Me, Bro” button toggled to elicit a reaction of some kind. Even then, people will point to futility: “cameras are everywhere” or “I gave up (on privacy|on life).”

What I can’t quite understand is why companies, or the faces of them, are no longer diplomatic. If you behave eccentrically, should you expect people to keep buying your cars? Yesterday it was just a car, and now it may be an extreme political symbol? GTFO. If you support some controversial position like mass surveillance, when it goes wrong, like Salt Typhoon but worse, how might you respond to shareholders as customers distance themselves? It’s ludicrous. Build an excellent product. Sell, sell, sell. People love it and buy more, more, more. People tell their friends, and they buy more, more, more. It’s that simple. Don’t complicate it with bad policy.

After I left Amazon, I noticed a couple of things. Virtually anything I could get from Amazon I could get elsewhere. eBay works very well. While reading Woolf’s To the Lighthouse² she mentions (presumably) Walter Scott, so I looked up Ivanhoe which I hadn’t read.

On Amazon, Ivanhoe was $6.51 and on eBay it was $4.97. I’d also have to spend an additional $30 on Amazon to get free shipping. This eBay seller had no minimum and free shipping to boot. eBay would not only save me more than 20%, but obnoxious cognitive overload trying to decide what else I “needed.”

Being without Amazon isn’t perfect. I needed a Zigbee controller for my electronic window film. On eBay, it was over $20. On Alibaba under $6, but coming from China.³ Amazon seems to warehouse Chinese goods so you can get it fast. It was only $10 there.

As more people are educated, they may see they’ve been operating like zombies in BigCo’s ecosystem. Deleting my Amazon account gave me pause. But if you have self-respect you’ll live deliberately.