On the topic of data being held about you...
On the
Coffee Thread I was inspired to find out how much Coffee Beans i'd bought since buying my bean to cup machine in 2015. Since I buy the vast majority of my beans though Amazon on Subscribe & Save, I initially looked for a way to download my order history from Amazon. It turns out that this was possible until earlier this yes (in the US at least), but that now various hoops have to be jumped through. The first method is to use a Chrome add-on to scrape the data which I describe in the coffee thread, the other way is to request your data via Amazon's
privacy central. The order data requested via privacy central became available just after my post in the coffee thread - about 2 hours after I requested it.
My Amazon order data covers 4,084 orders placed since March 1999, it is a 208MB ZIP file (which, somewhat bizarrely unzips to 207MB of data). Much of the content is taken up by PDF copies of the invoices relating to the orders I have placed, a text file (JSON format) detailing all of my transactions with Amazon UK is 3.4MB. However, 'orders' was just one of maybe 30 categories I was presented with when choosing which data to request, so i'm guessing that the data Amazon hold about me would run into gigabytes.
So now I have all of my Amazon order data in Excel (i'd be happy to explain how to ingest the JSON file as a table in Excel if anyone is interested) and the first sobering result is that i've spent £60,766.20 with Amazon to date and only £1,663.57 was on coffee beans