[wilde]

> Unless of course you don’t consider the information collected here personal.

I don’t. The author even goes out of their way to point out that these requests aren’t generated by the user and so there’s no latent interest information there. I agree that they should cover this behavior in the privacy policy explicitly, but there’s a tone of moral outrage in this piece that seems unearned.

[palant]

Note: I am the author of this article.

I’m really unsure how you would come to this conclusion. Even if you only read the summary at the beginning or only the conclusions section at the end, you should notice that Keepa is doing both. It will extract data from your Amazon visits (personal information) and do its own scraping (merely wasting your bandwidth if implemented correctly which I am unconvinced of).

[wilde]

Thanks for engaging here. Maybe my reading comprehension is poor, but here’s the full quote that I was objecting to. It comes after a long pull quote where Keepa promises to not log the requests that do contain latent interest behavior:

> This refers to some pieces of the Keepa functionality but it once again completely omits the data collection outlined here. It’s reassuring to know that they don’t log product identifiers when showing product history, but they don’t need to if on another channel their extension sends far more detailed data to the server. This makes the first sentence, formatted as bold text, a clear lie. Unless of course you don’t consider the information collected here personal. I’m not a lawyer, maybe in the legal sense it isn’t.

When I was reading, I thought that “data collection outlined here” referred to the scraping behavior you reverse engineered, since the pull quote covered the user-generated request. I agree that they should include the additional scraping behavior here for clarity (we’re arguing about it after all). I disagree that it constitutes as a “clear lie”, since I don’t think that data is personal.

[palant]

“Data collection outlined here” refers to both mechanisms covered by the article. The first one collects information about the products you look at which clearly is personal information. The automated scraping in the background is less problematic from the privacy protection point of view, at least when it is used in the intended way.

[45ure]

Thanks for the article.

I use this extension (and the app) regularly, which activates as soon as I visit Amazon in a container tab. In addition to providing in-depth statistics, features like alerts via Telegram have helped me hunt down bargains. I have noticed the increase in network requests and bandwidth when the tab is active, using basic tracking via Resource Monitor (W10). However, I can easily block it via uMatrix/uBO, if required. In this case, it is a trade-off, which can be justified.

Also, Tracker Control (Android) for Keepa app reports blocking just two trackers Google Crashlytics and Google Firebase Analytics -- so it is not as bad other apps.

I have used CamelCamelCamel in the past, which was more egregious and aggressive in tracking users, but don't know how it fares today.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/

[palant]

Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. You cannot use other extensions to block requests happening on the extension’s background page. Whatever tracking and scraping is going on, you can probably disable part of it via extension’s settings but otherwise there is nothing you can do.