Yes, but "having a human in the system" isn't answering the original question: what does Amazon benefit from introducing excess cost into this equation? Surely there should be nothing clandestine in your own usage data, search queries etc.
> Yes, but "having a human in the system" isn't answering the original question
It does. There is a human manually running queries to copy your data into an Excel spreadsheet (or equivalent) then passing that onto the next part in the chain. This is done quite a few times and stalls the process.
> what does Amazon benefit from introducing excess cost into this equation?
It's cheaper to have the already existing employees do this. They haven't hire a new team to do this.
> Surely there should be nothing clandestine in your own usage data, search queries etc.
I suspect there's more than you own personal data mixed into these systems. Your personal data is mixed in with Amazon's company confidential data so they need to separate these out before sending you only what's required by law.
Thanks. I still find it surprising a company of Amazon's stature wouldn't have figured out how to fully automate something relatively trivial like this.
> What benefit does Amazon get out of delaying giving out this information?
The same as the German police gets: the opportunity of checking if they actually are allowed to store the data they have on you.
There are next to no audits on the big data warehouses... not of cops, not of corporations, not of enterprises that are a mixture between cops and corporations (cough Palantir), which means they will scoop up all data they can get their hands on, and keep it as they like (Europol is currently under fire for that one [1]). And only when people actually inquire on the data that the cops, Amazon or whatever else have on them, then they look if they are actually allowed to keep the data - if not, it gets quietly deleted. But as it's only a tiny fraction of the population that exercises their GDPR rights, the big data warehouses get away with keeping 99.999% of stuff they should not legally be allowed to keep.
As for Amazon: they, for example, still have my orders from 2011 on their system, despite the legal mandate to keep these around being only for ten years [2].
There should be a legal requirement for all corporations and government agencies to send out a "data dump" to every citizen every year. People have absolutely no idea what troves of data exist about them.