On the contrary, it's sort of a way to give users more control over their data.
I work for another online retailer and have been involved in discussions about this same topic (order information in emails we send), and the way we looked at it was that:
- Gmail collects this data from emails
- The overwhelming majority of users are unaware of this data collection
- If we included the data in the email, while knowing that Gmail was collecting it and knowing that most users are not aware, that was tantamount to us just willingly handing over the data to Google without the users' consent
Because of this, we asked ourselves if users would likely feel upset with us willingly handing over data to Google without consent, and we decided that yes they would. So we made a trade off to not include that data in emails because we thought that was more important than the hit to UX we would take from making the emails less informative.
Either way we had to make a decision on behalf of our customers and we knew that no matter which one we chose, we knew some portion of users would be unhappy and decided to go with the more privacy-conscious choice.
I think the followup question in these cases is whether consumers can get the data _off_ of the main websites.
I do see a decent argument for companies being a little bit more conservative about what information they put in emails when this kind of information collection is largely invisible to the general public. It's just important to balance that against data silo worries by making it easy for customers to export their data and hook purchase confirmations up to other services that users might actually want to have access.
I'm not convinced Amazon makes these kinds of decisions out of a concern for user privacy (especially since Amazon isn't actually consistent about hiding this information in their emails as far as I can tell), but I'm sure some retailers are.
I work for another online retailer and have been involved in discussions about this same topic (order information in emails we send), and the way we looked at it was that:
- Gmail collects this data from emails
- The overwhelming majority of users are unaware of this data collection
- If we included the data in the email, while knowing that Gmail was collecting it and knowing that most users are not aware, that was tantamount to us just willingly handing over the data to Google without the users' consent
Because of this, we asked ourselves if users would likely feel upset with us willingly handing over data to Google without consent, and we decided that yes they would. So we made a trade off to not include that data in emails because we thought that was more important than the hit to UX we would take from making the emails less informative.
Either way we had to make a decision on behalf of our customers and we knew that no matter which one we chose, we knew some portion of users would be unhappy and decided to go with the more privacy-conscious choice.