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Copyright Anthology Labs Inc. 2021 - 2024
Dear Amazon,
My name is John Roa, and I’m the CEO of Caden. We’re a technology company in New York City whose goal is to empower the average person to control and benefit from their personal data—and provide companies like Amazon with more accurate, ethical, consent-based user data in the process. Caden is backed by top investors like Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, DoubleClick founding member Wenda Harris Millard, and a dozen top venture capital firms.
Our mission is simple: give every citizen the opportunity to participate in the data economy, and benefit from it. In turn, we strive to help companies like Amazon benefit by giving users more control and consent around how their personal data is used.
Like pretty much everyone else, I am a big fan and user of Amazon. My family relies on your service virtually daily. Here at Caden, we rely on AWS for most of our infrastructure. I have a lot of appreciation and empathy for your business and business model, as well as your leadership on the topics of user privacy, rights and trust.
My goal with this letter is to acknowledge Caden’s mission in the marketplace, make a case for the user, explain the significant long-term value to Amazon, and invoke tangible partnership conversations to build this future together.
As you know, legislation like CPRA includes a Right to Access clause which allows users of services like Amazon to request copies of their data. Additionally, the CPRA includes a Right of Portability which requires “any electronic information must be provided in a format that can be easily ported to a different service provider”. In Amazon case, that would include a record of products that they've purchased, movies they've watched, etc. That is data each user has a right to, and is also valuable data for a user to be in control of. Not only can that data help to tell a story (how does my carbon footprint improve based on my Amazon shopping?) but if a user so chose, that data could be directly monetizable by the user, which is their right.
As a privacy-minded company, Amazon has already done a great job giving users the ability to access this data in passive ways. We’ve very grateful to see that. However, the available methods create a lot of friction and only let a user access their data at a certain moment in time.
On behalf of Caden, our users, and even our competitors, we would like to engage in a direct conversation about Amazon providing more technology-enabled methods (like a secure API) for users to access their own data, so they can connect it to other sources freely. This is in the spirit of what various global data privacy laws mandate with Right to Access and Right to Portability, and is also what banks have opened up to create the innovative Open Banking sector.
It goes without saying: this data-sharing freedom would benefit companies like Caden and many others in our industry as we work to open up walled gardens and empower users. However, we also believe this creates a number of significant advantages for Amazon as well.
First, more than half of your users rate their privacy as “extremely important”1 and 92% of customers appreciate companies giving them control over what information is collected about them2. We are in the middle of a rapid transition to a privacy-first internet, and brands who create data security, privacy, transparency and portability are going to win consumer favor. Amazon is constantly in the public conversation about user privacy (in positive and negative ways). We believe there are ways to really lead the charge for user rights and build valuable brand equity in the meantime.
Second, while we recognize that letting data more freely flow out of our walled gardens is antithetical to how we’ve looked at digital marketing for the last couple decades, there is a significant benefit when you consider data can then easily flow back to Amazon. 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience3. This means that by allowing users to more freely access and transport their data, you are not only adhering to a privacy promise that users find important, but you are now equipping users to share amazing data back to you (imagine: users sharing their non-Amazon purchases with Amazon so you can offer more relevant recommendations). More user control of data means revolutionary access to consent-based high-quality first-party data that does not sit in silos. As the undisputed leader in the subscription economy, we know that Amazon lives and breathes consumer behavior and finds opportunities to surprise users with prescient, data-driven experiences. What better way to take that user stickiness into the next generation than to open a dialogue with users where they can provide the information stream necessary to make every user’s experience even more bespoke?
Third, Amazon and all modern consumer brands are rapidly losing the ability to connect with users through their data, and this downturn comes at an incredible cost. The IAB recently said that 50% of signal has already been lost4, and that will only get worse. IAPP estimates new privacy laws will cost American businesses a trillion dollars over 10 years5. Between third-party cookie depreciation, Apple’s ATT and other similar measures, ad effectiveness is severely diminished. The most effective way to speak to the customer, whether internally, externally, or to support your own ad platform, is to do it with fully consented and ethically-sourced data that comes straight from the user.
This is why we ask that Amazon implements sanctioned APIs that allow users to access their personal data in realtime without obstruction. Open Banking gave us a model that Amazon can follow to create a valuable ecosystem of fully-private but freely-flowing data. And we’d love to help you execute it.
Please let me know personally if you are open to the conversation. It is my commitment that the full extent of my small but mighty team will work to make Amazon more successful in promoting privacy, fairness and security.
John Roa
Founder, CEO
1 https://blockthrough.com/blog/2021-adblock-report
2 https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-the-connected-customer/
3 https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-77/Accenture-Pulse-Survey.pdf
4 https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/iab-to-apple-please-take-a-seat-at-the-table/