Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.
As someone responsible for login/registration at a large online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks. Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-login with credentials from password dumps, try to register accounts controlled by bots.
Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.
If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.
I'd guess that their problem is data pollution (marketing unhappy, ads impressions unaligned, data needs to be cleaned anyway before PowerPoint presentations for shareholders are made). And technically: unnecessary database growth which impacts migration efficiency, backup size and duration and stuff like that.
They don't seem to care about ad impressions being unaligned when their ads hit people who consider all forms of advertising to be a form of offensive and unauthorized graffiti on the mind, AKA vandalism.
> Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome / less hostile.
I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation".
I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff; mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS - not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.
