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We crowdsourced and published a first-of-its-kind open dataset that contains Amazon purchase histories, spanning 2018 to 2022, from more than 5000 US consumers, along with their sociodemographics.
Our paper "Open e-commerce 1.0, five years of crowdsourced U.S. Amazon purchase histories with user demographics" published via Nature Scientific data describes the dataset, how to access it, and how it might be used to supplement government census data.
We also built an experiment into the data crowdsourcing process. We did this to research which factors impact people's likelihood to share their data for open research, to help inform future crowdsourcing efforts. Results from the experiment are published via CSCW in our paper "Insights from an experiment crowdsourcing data from thousands of US Amazon users: The importance of transparency, money, and data use".
Crowdsourcing was possible because Amazon.com platform users had access to their own data. To help empower future crowdsourcing, in December 2022 we published an FTC comment regarding their upcoming commercial surveillance rulemaking.
In our comment we "encourage the FTC to ensure that its commercial surveillance and data security rulemaking facilitates and empowers consumers to share their data, with their informed consent, with researchers and consumer advocacy organizations, and prohibits corporate practices designed to prevent this... to help surface hidden harms, furthering the FTC’s mission".