Amazon Knows You Have a Goldfish Named Ziggy, Even if You Don’t
Amazon's 'About You' page has gained attention for displaying highly specific and sometimes inaccurate personal data derived from customer purchase histories. The feature, which compiles facts about users' preferences and household items, sparked online discussion after a user shared a screenshot revealing an embarrassing and incorrect description of their body. While the data can be amusing or intrusive, it highlights the extensive level of personalization and profiling that major e-commerce platforms perform on their customers.
- ▪Amazon's 'About You' page aggregates purchase data to create a profile of customer preferences and household details.
- ▪The page went viral after a user shared a screenshot showing Amazon incorrectly labeled them as having 'flat buttocks'.
- ▪CNET Editor-in-Chief David Katzmaier shared his profile, which listed specific aquarium details including a goldfish named Ziggy that he does not actually own.
- ▪Users can access this information through their Amazon account settings under 'shopping preferences' on both mobile and desktop devices.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | CNET — News |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/amazon-about-you-page-shopping-preferences/ |
| Publication time | 2026-10-07T18:33:00Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T20:57:28.885Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T20:57:37.914Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ioO9bBeu6iXM · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech > Services & Software > Online > Online Services Amazon Knows You Have a Goldfish Named Ziggy, Even if You Don’t Flat buttocks? Own a snail? Here's how to find out what Amazon's About You page knows — or thinks it knows — about you as a person. Gael Cooper CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?… Read full bio Gael Cooper Read full bio October 7, 2026, 2:35 pm ET 3 min read Amazon knows a scary amount of facts about you. Nur Photo/Getty Images Websites have long kept personalized information about their customers, and it can be useful. Bath & Body Works might alert you to a sale on its three-wick candles, or your local theater can tell you when the musical Six comes to town.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET — News.
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