Amazon’s “About You” page reveals what it thinks it knows about you—and you can’t simply switch it off.

Dexerto reports that one shopper discovered her profile included the observation:

“has flat buttocks”

She suggested this might relate to a previous purchase of “butt scrunch leggings.” Whatever the connection, buying clothes doesn’t mean you expect the retailer to start describing your body.

What is Amazon’s About You?

About You is a page where customers can review and edit the personal details Amazon uses to shape their shopping recommendations. Amazon introduced it in May as a way to make personalization more visible and easier to manage.

According to Amazon, the information behind its personalized shopping experience includes:

• Your purchase history
• Your searches
• Items saved to Lists
• Product reviews you have written
• Conversations with Alexa for Shopping

The resulting profile can contain categories such as “Home and Family,” “Interests and Hobbies,” “Brands,” and “Product Preferences.” Some entries describe straightforward shopping preferences. Others go further, making assumptions about how people live.

Amazon presents this as helpful. If you regularly buy non-dairy milk, for example, it might recommend other non-dairy products. But a useful recommendation and an accurate description of a person are not the same thing.

After all, a purchase might be a gift. An item on a list might be something you’re researching for someone else. A product search might reflect curiosity rather than a personal need.

Amazon has offered personalized recommendations for years. About You makes some of the information behind them visible and gives you a chance to see where its assumptions miss the mark.

How to find your information

To check what Amazon thinks it knows about you, log in to your Amazon account.

• Hover over your name above Account & Lists, near the top-right corner.
• Select Account.
• Find the tile Ordering and shopping preferences, and select Your Shopping preferences.
• From there, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Manage your information.

In the Amazon app, it works like this:

• After logging in, tap You at the bottom
• Tap Account > Account Settings > Shopping preferences > About You

Managing your information

To remove an entry:

• Select a category to see what Amazon has listed about you, either because you volunteered it or Amazon assumed it based on your buying behavior.
• Select Remove. You don’t need to select a reason. Select Remove again in the confirmation prompt.

Buying something should not be treated as volunteering every personal detail a retailer can infer from it. It’s good that these assumptions are visible and that you can remove them, but customers shouldn’t have to correct a profile they never deliberately filled out.

A meaningful privacy choice would let customers decline personal inferences, not merely delete them one at a time. It would also explain what deletion does. Is the information removed from Amazon’s servers or just moved out of your sight?

Amazon says you can remove information you don’t want used for personalization. Its announcement does not explain whether that also deletes the underlying data, or whether similar assumptions could be made again as you continue shopping. Nor does it describe a master opt-out from About You.

For now, checking your profile lets you see (and challenge) some of the conclusions Amazon has drawn about you.

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This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

If you want AI to tell you a story, it will. If you want that story to sound like one of your favorite authors, it can. And if you’re one of the authors that AI can imitate, you might be a little upset at what feels like theft.

In 2024, the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, the creator of Claude, alleging that the company had wrongfully digested millions of copyrighted works—including some of their very own—to train its AI models. The lawsuit grew to include more than 300,000 writers, and in September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the claims.

That headline-worthy payout, however, would eventually be paired with more startling news.

In January 2026, a district court judge unsealed thousands of documents related to the litigation. When The Washington Post investigated the documents, reporters found references to a secret project inside Anthropic called “Project Panama,” which Anthropic itself described as the company’s effort “to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Anthropic is not alone in this.

On August 17, 404 Media co-founder and reporter Emanuel Maiberg revealed that Amazon is doing something similar inside a department it calls VGT3. By hiding an Apple AirTag in one book from a 1,000-book order, and then tracking the shipment across the country, 404 Media identified the book’s final destination to be a facility outside Las Vegas, where, according to employees, books are cut apart and scanned.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Maiberg about Amazon’s VGT3 operation and the likely commonplace practice of AI companies purchasing, scanning, and destroying books in an effort to build “frontier” models.

“They’re buying a book, they’re scanning it, they’re mulching the book, and then the digital version of the book exists behind this wall where we don’t even know if they plan to sell it, right? It’s like they might keep it behind a wall, and the only way we see it come out again from behind that wall is in the form of an answer from a chatbot.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

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Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

If you’ve spent any time browsing lately, you may have run into a full-screen popup warning you that your Apple ID or Amazon account was just used for a mysterious $149.99 purchase. It looks urgent. It looks official. And if you look at two examples side by side, it becomes obvious that it’s neither.

Below are two popups pulled from real pages—one dressed up as Apple Support, one as Amazon.

Same con, two costumes

Below, one popup is skinned as Apple Support, the other as Amazon. Swap the logo and color palette and the structure is identical: a warning icon, a claim that a $149.99 purchase was just made “via Pre-Authorization,” and a phone number to call immediately. That phone number is exactly the same in both.

That reused phone number is the tell. If you only see one popup, running the number through a lookup tool like Malwarebytes Scam Number Check is usually enough to expose it—a real Apple or Amazon line won’t come back flagged, but a scam number typically does, often tied to complaints about several unrelated companies at once.

Why the copy is built the way it is

Every element in these popups is doing specific psychological work:

• A believable, moderate dollar amount. $149.99 is high enough to alarm you, low enough to sound like a real subscription or product charge rather than an obvious lie.
• “Pre-Authorization” jargon. This is real payment terminology (used for things like hotel holds or gas station charges), borrowed here to sound technically credible to someone who doesn’t handle payments professionally.
• Manufactured urgency. “Call immediately,” “Immediate Action Required,” “no hold times”—all are designed to get you dialing before you stop to verify anything.
• Visual authority. Red warning triangles, brand-matching fonts and layouts, and a full-screen modal that blocks the rest of the page all borrow the visual language of legitimate security alerts.
• A single, frictionless call to action. One button, one phone number. The popup wants exactly one thing from you: to pick up the phone.

If you do call, the number connects to a live scammer posing as support staff, whose actual goal is to get remote access to your device, walk you through “verifying” your identity in a way that hands over real account or payment info, or push you toward paying a fake fee—often via gift cards or a wire transfer.

How to tell if it’s fake

A few checks work regardless of which brand is being impersonated:

1. Real companies don’t alert you this way. Apple and Amazon notify you about account activity through email, in-app notifications, or your account’s activity log—never through an unexpected popup while you’re browsing.
2. No legitimate company tells you to call a phone number to stop a charge. Disputing a charge happens through your bank, your card issuer, or the company’s actual account dashboard—not a hotline dictated by a popup.
3. Check where the popup is actually served from. These often ride in on malicious ads, compromised sites, or browser redirects—the underlying page may be spoofed or injected, not the real apple.com or amazon.com support page it appears to sit on top of.
4. A popup you can’t easily close is a red flag on its own. Legitimate sites don’t need to trap you behind a full-screen modal to relay account information.
5. If in doubt, go direct. Close the tab (force-close via task manager if needed) and navigate to the company’s site yourself, or call the number printed on your card or official account page—never the one in the popup.
6. Check the number before you dial it. Run it through Malwarebytes Scam Number Check to see if it’s already been flagged as a scam line.
7. Block it before it loads. A browser extension like Malwarebytes Browser Guard catches both known malicious pages and unknown ones showing scam-like behavior, so these popups often get stopped before they ever render.

Don’t judge a scam by its logo

The brand on screen—Apple, Amazon, or whoever’s next—is the least important part of this scam. What actually matters is the pattern underneath: an unexpected popup, a suspiciously specific dollar amount, urgent language, and a phone number that wants you to call before you think. Once you recognize that pattern, it doesn’t matter which company’s name is stamped on top of it.