They Track Everything, Not Just Purchases
Flipkart knows what you searched for at 2 AM last night. Amazon knows you looked at that laptop three times before buying it. Meesho knows which products you shared on WhatsApp and which ones you kept to yourself. These platforms record everything, not just what you buy. Everything you do inside their apps and on their websites gets logged, timestamped, and fed into a profile that grows more detailed every time you open the app.
When you first create an account on any of these platforms, you hand over the obvious details: your name, your phone number, your email, a delivery address. That part is expected and necessary. But the data collection that happens after you sign up goes so far beyond that initial set of details that most people would be uncomfortable if they saw the full picture.
From the moment you launch the Flipkart app, it starts recording your activity. Every search query you type. Every product listing you tap on. Every listing you scroll past without tapping. The exact amount of time you spend on each product page. Do you read customer reviews before deciding to buy, or just glance at the star rating? Do you add items to your cart and then abandon them, or buy right away? Are you a weekday shopper or a weekend one? A late-night browser or a lunch-break scroller? All of this is tracked, and all of it feeds into an algorithmic profile of you as a consumer.
Amazon does the same, with a few additions. Amazon tracks your browsing pattern across its own network of services. If you have an Alexa device, your voice queries get linked to your shopping profile. If you use Amazon Pay for bill payments or money transfers, those transactions add more data points. Amazon Prime Video viewing habits can be correlated with your shopping interests. It is one company, but the data flows between its services, and the combined picture is remarkably detailed.
The apps also collect technical information about your device. Your phone model, your operating system version, your screen resolution, your network provider, your IP address, and your approximate location even when you have not given the app explicit location permission. The Flipkart app has been observed tracking GPS coordinates in the background, meaning it can log where you physically go even when you are not using the app. Amazon collects your device’s unique advertising ID, which allows it to recognise you across different apps and services. Meesho, because its business model depends on social sharing, pays close attention to your sharing patterns: which products you forward to contacts, which groups you share them in, and which of your shares result in purchases by other people.
Some shopping apps have been caught scanning clipboard data. Whatever you last copied on your phone, whether it is a phone number, a URL, a piece of text from a message, or a UPI ID, can be read by the app when you open it. Apple flagged this behaviour publicly when iOS 14 introduced clipboard access notifications, and several Indian apps were caught doing it before quietly removing the feature.
All of this raw data gets processed by algorithms that do not just track what you buy. They infer what kind of person you are. Bought baby products once? You are tagged as a likely new parent, and you will see baby-related ads and product suggestions for months. Ordered protein powder and a fitness band? Health-conscious consumer. Started browsing suitcases and travel accessories? Probably planning a trip, so here are flight deals and hotel offers. Purchased expensive electronics on release day without waiting for a price drop? High-income, impulse-buyer category, likely to pay full price in the future.
The inferences extend to things you never told the platform. Your approximate income bracket. Your family composition. Your health status. Your religious and dietary preferences (if you order specific kinds of food). The time of month you tend to have more spending capacity, which for salaried employees tends to be the first week after payday. All of this is inferred, not declared, and it shapes what products you see, what prices you are shown, and what ads follow you around the internet after you close the app.
The part that bothers me is how invisible this whole process is. There is no notification that says “We noticed you spent four minutes looking at a washing machine and then closed the app, so we have flagged you as a likely buyer and will be showing you washing machine ads on Instagram for the next two weeks.” It just happens silently, and unless you are paying close attention, you might think it is coincidence that ads keep appearing for products you were just thinking about.
Dynamic Pricing: You Might Pay More Than the Next Person
Two people sitting in the same room, looking at the same product on the same platform at the same time, can see different prices on their screens. This is called dynamic pricing, and Indian e-commerce sites use it. The platforms do not openly advertise this practice, but enough users have documented price differences across devices and accounts that the pattern is difficult to dismiss.
The basic version of dynamic pricing is not new and not controversial. Prices change based on supply, demand, inventory levels, and competitor pricing. Airlines have done this for decades, and hotel booking sites adjust rates constantly based on occupancy and season. Nobody objects to the idea that a product might cost more during a festival sale than on a random Tuesday in February. That is market dynamics.
But what e-commerce platforms do goes beyond simple supply-and-demand adjustment. They factor in your data. Your browsing history, your device type, your pin code, your purchase history, your spending patterns, how many times you have viewed a particular product, and whether your behaviour suggests you are a price-sensitive bargain hunter or someone who buys without comparing. All of this can influence the price you see for a given product at a given moment.
Users have reported seeing higher prices when browsing on iPhones compared to budget Android phones. People in affluent neighbourhoods have noticed different pricing than users in other areas for the same product. If you have searched for a product multiple times over several days, demonstrating a clear intention to purchase, the price may inch upward on your next visit. The algorithm reads your repeated visits as a signal that you want the product badly enough that a small price increase will not deter you.
Researchers and journalists who have tested this by searching for the same products on different devices, different accounts, and different networks have documented price variations that cannot be explained by simple demand-based adjustments. A 2022 investigation by a consumer rights group found price differences of 3 to 8 percent for identical products on the same platform when accessed from different user profiles with different browsing histories. The platform in question denied personalised pricing, attributing the differences to “real-time inventory and seller pricing adjustments.” But the timing and consistency of the differences suggested something more targeted.
Sale events amplify the problem. During Flipkart’s Big Billion Days or Amazon’s Great Indian Festival, many of the “deals” are discounts calculated from artificially inflated original prices. Price tracking tools like PriceHistory.in and Keepa have repeatedly shown that products are marked up in the weeks leading up to a sale, only to be “discounted” back to or near their regular price during the event. A television that sold for 32,000 rupees in September might be listed at 40,000 in early October, then offered at 33,500 during the sale with a banner claiming a 16 percent discount. You are paying more than you would have paid a month ago, while the platform tells you that you are getting a deal.
The countdown timers, the “only 3 left in stock” warnings, the “47 people are looking at this right now” notifications. All of these are pressure tactics designed to make you purchase quickly without taking the time to verify whether the price is actually good. They work because urgency short-circuits the part of your brain that would normally compare prices across sources before committing.
Verifying is not difficult. Search for the product in an incognito browser window on a different device. Install PriceHistory.in as a browser extension and check the price history before purchasing anything during a sale. Compare across platforms rather than trusting the first price you see. These steps take thirty seconds and can save you real money, especially on higher-value purchases like electronics and appliances.
Third-Party Data Sharing You Never Agreed To
When you purchase something on Flipkart, your data does not stay on Flipkart’s servers. It gets copied, forwarded, and distributed to a chain of companies that most buyers never think about and would not recognise by name. The advertising partners, the analytics firms, the payment processors, the logistics companies, and every third-party seller you have ever bought from on the platform all receive some portion of your personal information.
Amazon shares data with its own advertising arm, Amazon Ads, which uses your shopping behaviour and browsing history to target you with ads across millions of websites and apps that participate in Amazon’s ad network. If you have ever noticed that searching for a product on Amazon leads to ads for that exact product appearing on unrelated websites and apps within minutes, that is the pipeline at work. Your browsing data flows from Amazon to its ad network, the ad network matches your identity across platforms using your email address, phone number, or device advertising ID, and the ad is served to you wherever you go next online.
Flipkart, which is owned by Walmart, shares data within the Walmart group and with its advertising and analytics partners. The Flipkart Ads platform works similarly to Amazon’s, allowing advertisers to target users based on their shopping and browsing behaviour on Flipkart. The data pipeline connecting your Flipkart activity to the ads you see elsewhere is fast and largely invisible to the user.
Both Amazon and Flipkart share your name, delivery address, and phone number with every third-party seller whose products you buy. This is necessary for order fulfilment, but what happens to your data after the seller receives it is largely unmonitored. Some sellers maintain proper data handling practices. Many do not. Your name, address, and phone number could end up in an unprotected spreadsheet on someone’s personal laptop, backed up to a Google Drive with no password, or shared with a marketing service that uses it to send promotional messages.
The part that bothers me about third-party seller data access is the scale. A large platform like Amazon India has lakhs of active sellers. Even if 95 percent of them handle customer data responsibly, the remaining 5 percent represent thousands of sellers with access to customer phone numbers and addresses and no effective oversight of how they use that access. Several people I know have received unsolicited WhatsApp messages from sellers months after a purchase, offering deals on similar products. The seller got their phone number from the order, and nothing stops them from using it for marketing, or from sharing it with other businesses.
Payment processors represent another data pipeline. When you pay by card, the payment gateway records your transaction amount, the merchant name, the time, and your card details (which it is supposed to store in encrypted, tokenised form). When you pay via UPI, your UPI ID and transaction details flow through the payment processor and the relevant banks. These records are supposedly protected, but payment data breaches have happened globally, and Indian payment processors are not immune.
Logistics partners get your full delivery address, your phone number, and the details of what you ordered. Delivery personnel call you from their personal phones, which means your number ends up in the call history of dozens of different delivery agents over the course of a year. If you log in to a shopping platform using your Google account, your shopping activity gets linked to your Google profile, which is already one of the most data-rich profiles any company has on you. The connection between your Google browsing data and your Amazon or Flipkart shopping data creates a combined picture of your online life that is extraordinarily detailed.
The privacy policies of these platforms technically disclose most of this sharing. But the policies are long, written in legal language, and designed to be broad enough to cover virtually any use of your data. Nobody reads them, and the companies know nobody reads them. The consent you give when you click “I agree” during account creation is a formality that covers a breadth of data sharing most users would be uncomfortable with if they understood the specifics.
Reducing Your Footprint Without Quitting Online Shopping
Stopping all data collection while shopping online is not realistic. Some data sharing is built into how e-commerce works. You need to give an address for delivery. You need to provide payment information. The platform needs to know what you ordered to process the order. That baseline level of data exchange is unavoidable.
But there is an enormous gap between the data that is necessary for a transaction and the data that platforms collect for profiling and advertising. Most of the tracking described in the previous sections falls into the second category, and most of it can be reduced or blocked with a few changes to how you shop.
The single most effective change is to stop using the shopping apps and switch to a browser instead. Use Firefox or Brave, both of which have built-in tracking protection that blocks third-party cookies, fingerprinting scripts, and much of the background data collection that apps rely on. When you shop through a browser with tracking protection enabled, the platform can still see what you do on their site during that session, but it loses the ability to track your location in the background, scan your clipboard, access your contacts, or correlate your activity with other apps on your phone.
The platforms push you very hard toward using their apps. “App-only deals.” Pop-ups that cover half the screen telling you the experience is better in the app. Prices that appear slightly lower in the app than on the mobile website. These are not coincidences or bugs. They are deliberate tactics because the app gives the platform access to far more of your data than a browser session does. The “better experience” they are offering you is a trade: convenience and maybe a small discount in exchange for deep access to your phone, your habits, and your location. That trade benefits them far more than it benefits you.
Beyond switching to a browser, there are several other steps that reduce your data exposure. Use a separate email address for shopping accounts, one that is not connected to your primary email, your banking, or your social media. This prevents the easy cross-referencing that ad networks use to link your shopping activity with the rest of your online identity. A free ProtonMail or Tutanota account takes two minutes to set up and serves this purpose well.
Pay with UPI rather than saving your card details on the platform. Every platform asks you to save your card for “faster checkout,” but saving your card means the platform and its payment partners retain your card data on their servers, which becomes a liability if there is a breach. UPI payments are processed in real time and do not require the merchant to store your card information. You type your PIN each time, which takes five extra seconds, but it means your card details are not sitting in yet another company’s database.
Use guest checkout when available. Not all platforms offer this, but when they do, it means you can complete a purchase without creating an account or logging in. Your data is still collected for that specific transaction, but it is not linked to a persistent profile that grows over time. Myntra and a few other platforms offer guest checkout. Amazon and Flipkart do not, but if you must use an account, log out after every session and clear cookies.
Clear your cookies and browsing history after each shopping session. This removes the tracking cookies that follow you around the internet and serve you targeted ads based on what you browsed. On Firefox, you can set cookies to be deleted automatically when you close the browser. Brave does this by default for third-party cookies.
Disable location access for every shopping app on your phone. No shopping app needs your GPS location to process an order. Your delivery address serves that purpose. Location tracking is used for analytics, for building a profile of where you go and when, and for serving you location-based ads. Turn it off.
Submit a data deletion request to platforms you no longer use. If you had a Snapdeal account five years ago, or a Shopclues account, or signed up for JioMart during the lockdown and never went back, your data is still sitting on their servers. Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho, and most other platforms have a data deletion process, though none of them make it easy to find. You usually need to email their grievance officer or submit a request through a privacy settings page buried deep in your account settings. The response time varies. Amazon typically responds within a few weeks. Flipkart can take longer. But the request is worth making, because data that no longer exists on a server cannot be leaked from that server.
None of this makes you invisible to online stores. But it puts a wall between them and the detailed profile they are building. Small walls add up. And honestly, using a guest checkout instead of saving your card takes about ten extra seconds. That seems like a fair trade.
Comments (0)