Amazon’s ‘About You’ Feature Reads Its Customers Well — Until It Doesn’t

Amazon’s data-hungry empire now holds up a mirror to its shoppers, and sometimes that reflection is hilariously off-mark. The e-commerce giant rolled out its “About You” feature in May, but it only drew widespread attention this week after several users took to social media to share the surprisingly blunt — and occasionally embarrassing — assessments their accounts had generated.

The tool compiles what Amazon has learned about each customer’s buying habits into a set of “Product Preferences,” producing a personalized snapshot that ranges from flattering to flat-out wrong. While it is meant to help tailor product recommendations, the results have left many users literally speechless at how (in)accurately their shopping history had been interpreted.

What Is Amazon’s ‘About You’?

The feature essentially summarizes an account holder’s purchasing behavior into a series of lifestyle and preference tags, giving customers a peek behind the curtain of the data that Amazon collects to drive future sales. It is accessible directly from any Amazon account on both desktop and mobile.

To view it on desktop, users hover over “Hello, [your name]” at the top of the site, select “Account,” then navigate through “Ordering and shopping preferences” to “Your Shopping preferences,” where the information sits under “Manage your information.” The mobile experience is somewhat more streamlined: tap the menu icon in the bottom bar, open “Account,” then land on “About you” within “Shopping preferences.”

A Community Gets Read for Filth

The renewed interest arrived after one user discovered that, based on her Product Preferences, Amazon believed she had “flat buttocks.” She was not alone in being left stunned. Other shoppers reported that the feature had logged everything from awkward body-shape observations to surprising claims about their daily habits, prompting a wave of shared screenshots across X and Reddit.

To see what their own profiles contained, members of the PC Gamer team pulled up their “About You” entries with mixed results. One writer found her profile frightfully mundane, noting only that she prefers plant-based milk and systematically replaces consumable household items — a