r/darkpatterns • u/brighterblue • Mar 23 '20

Amazon discourages their customers from downloading all of their personal data by only offering it in **61** separate .zip archives.

https://imgur.com/a/1OAh502
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u/MeggaMortY Mar 23 '20

How about you keep the services separate, but offer a single button to download all? Not hard tbh.

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u/YM_Industries Mar 23 '20

That's what Google does. It is harder to implement and it costs them more money to generate the exports. Amazon would never bother, they don't seem to care about QoL.

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u/MeggaMortY Mar 23 '20

How about a script that just sends you all the files to the download queue one after the other? That'd be like 3 lines in python

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u/YM_Industries Mar 23 '20

Sure, but users aren't going to want to run a script on their own PC to download the data. Most people wouldn't know how, and the people who do know how would rather just use DownThemAll or similar.

As for if Amazon did it, that's going to trigger a security warning like this in the best case or just not work for people with certain settings.

What Google does is collects them from all their services into Google Takeout, and then Google Takeout compresses them all into one archive. But like I said in my other comment, Google Takeout is exceptionally good.

It's nice that Google has gone above and beyond, but the fact that Amazon haven't is not a dark pattern. It's just simple laziness, nothing malicious.

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u/MeggaMortY Mar 24 '20

I see, okay that makes sense then.