Amazon has stopped naming purchased items in its order confirmation emails, which now show only a category like Beauty or Wireless Accessories next to clip art, according to The Verge. The vague version started showing up around July, while orders placed in June still listed the exact item. A spokesperson said Amazon simplified the emails to point customers toward its own order pages, and that doing so reduces the customer information leaving its properties. Amazon’s statement did not address whether the format shields purchase data from Google, whose Gemini mines a user’s inbox for details it can act on. Amazon pulled the same trick in 2020, quietly stripping item details down to an order total and a date, and observers at the time read it the same way, as a move to stop third parties from scraping inboxes. Walmart, Target, and Wayfair opted into Google’s AI shopping features, but Amazon stayed off them. Shoppers who want to know what they bought have to open the app.
