Amazon's shopping-preferences page shows how deeply it profiles you

Amazon has long customized the shopping experience based on purchase history — buy a lot of cat litter, and it may infer you have a cat; buy a lot of anti-acne products, and it may guess you’re prone to breakouts. That kind of inference became impossible to ignore this week after a Threads user, @fangirlinmegan, found a settings page listing Amazon’s assumptions about her. Alongside relatively benign guesses like “Shops from women’s departments” and “Probably owns a Shark robot vacuum,” the page concluded she “has flat buttocks” — an inference she attributed to a past purchase of “butt scrunch leggings.” “I stumbled upon a page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless,” she wrote. The post drew over a million views in less than a day.

The page is easy to find once you know where to look. On desktop, hover over “Hello, [your name]” in the upper right corner, click “Account” under “Your Account,” then “Your Shopping preferences” under “Ordering and shopping preferences.” Scrolling to the bottom reveals a link labeled “Manage your information,” which surfaces the full list of assumptions. On the mobile app, the same page sits behind the hamburger menu, under “Account,” then “Shopping preferences,” then “About you.”

TechCrunch’s own test of the feature turned up a milder set of inferences: “practices photography,” “plays collectible card games,” “invested in the Apple ecosystem,” and “reads diverse non-fiction.” Colleagues who checked their own pages found similarly accurate guesses about a fondness for vinyl records and ceramics, a preference for “natural materials” in home decor, and clothing that “prioritizes comfort.”

The episode underscores how much behavioral data retailers accumulate from ordinary purchases — the same kind of signal that normally surfaces only as subtle product recommendations. Seeing it spelled out in plain language, rather than inferred invisibly, is what made this particular list land so differently for readers scrolling through their own accounts.

Why it matters

A settings page that spells out an algorithm’s assumptions in plain English makes visible a kind of behavioral profiling that normally stays buried inside a recommendation engine — and as more platforms expose their own “why we think this about you” pages, expect more scrutiny of how much retailers infer from a purchase history most shoppers never think to audit.