Defeating Amazon's Universal Wish List

Amazon launched a new web browser toolbar button, called Universal Wish List that allows a user to add any page, regardless of the domain to their Amazon.com wish list.

While this button currently works on any web page, it's clearly targeted at other e-commerce websites. Why? Is Amazon planning to data mine the competitor product links people add to their Amazon-hosted wish list and cross reference with Amazon.com's own product offerings? Probably. At the very least, Universal Wish List gives Amazon an eerie amount of information about their customer's shopping habits such as:

• Where else on the web their customers are shopping
• What products people want that Amazon may not carry (yet)
• Better Amazon.com product recommendations for you! :)

What if you're a merchant who has your own wish list, or you just don't want Amazon stealing your traffic? You can defeat their wish list button, here's how:

Amazon uses JavaScript to add an object named AUWLBook to your web page and then invokes a function called showPopover() on this object when the user clicks Amazon's Add to Wish List button.

To defeat this, all we have to do is define a JavaScript object named AUWLBook with our own showPopover() function on the page before Amazon has a chance to.

   <script>
        var AUWLBook = new Object();
        AUWLBook.showPopover = function() {
          alert('No Universal wish list here!');
        };      
   </script>

You can view a demo or take the code above and use it on your own site. Obviously, the function should do something more useful than display an annoying pop-up.