Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by y04nn on Sunday March 27, 2022 @11:33AM (#30821023)

I had to click through more than 100 links to download all the data, how can this be acceptable? Specially coming from Amazon. How hard is it for them to create an archive with all the data? This is ridiculous, I can't imagine how was the meeting when they decided to produce purposefully such garbage UX.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by NelsonMinar on Sunday March 27, 2022 @01:03PM (#30821845)

Here's a picture of the UI for the download, with 123 different "Download" buttons. https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1503848290193862658

I did an Amazon download too, after Amazon's subsidiary Goodreads lost all my data of 9 years. I'm grateful for how the GDPR and the CCPA mandate that companies provide data downloads. Amazon is clearly doing the bare minimum to comply. Other companies do more; Twitter's data download comes with a fully working offline Javascript app for reading and searching your tweets!

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by lrem on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @03:33AM (#30839833)

I'm not sure "an archive with all the data" is what you really want either. At some point you'll hit the limit of how much data does your filesystem allow in one file. Not sure if your browser is that good at resuming failed downloads too.

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by yencabulator on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @01:12PM (#30858028)

Google Takeout lets you split into multiple zips based on size. Amazon's take on this is just willfully evil.

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by MaxGanzII on Sunday March 27, 2022 @12:40PM (#30821644)

Exactly the problem I had.

It would take Amazon almost no effort to make a single archive with all those files in.

I cannot help but view this as deliberate obstruction.

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by IshKebab on Sunday March 27, 2022 @04:15PM (#30823673)

Pretty sure there are a gazillion browser extensions that can do that for you. Not ideal but hardly the end of the world.

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by ok123456 on Sunday March 27, 2022 @06:25PM (#30824774)

Can't you open up the developer tools use a css query to select all the buttons, and send a click event to them all?

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Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by y04nn on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @06:49AM (#30853491)

Yes, it's doable in a one liner, but then you get a warning of your browser, then 100 windows asking to confirm to save the file, it still is terrible UX. And form my experience, most users are not aware of the dev console.

For others that may be interested by the data you get, it is quite detailed, I would recommend to use VisiData that make it really easy to navigate inside zip files and csv the files inside (most often a single file).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusi... by sean2 on Monday March 28, 2022 @06:14PM (#30836270)

Yes, most commenters on HN could could, but for the general public, it's not a great interface.

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