Amazon Search Bar Will Track Your Browsing

Limit writes "There has been a lot of discussion regarding GMail and Google's privacy policies. However, with the recent debut of Amazon's A9.com, I havn't seen any mention to the information they intend to collect. I saw this article today, "The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way ... If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well." Where is all the media hype about this privacy issue?"

Comments

Obvious

[Walkiry]

Google is just a company started by a few geeks that made it big because they give an excellent service and that's it. Amazon is infested by the long tentacles of certain corporations and that's what matters to their business.

Guess which one is going to be slammed by the "traditional media" time and again.

I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers".

[blcamp]

Seems to me that installing any third party browser add-on is only asking for trouble.

Why add another executable that will sap some your system resources while at the same time be able to monitor your surfing habits?

Doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me...

Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers".

[xyzzy]

I agree. I'm tired of all these people whining about privacy in this regard. Don't like it? DON'T FSCKING USE IT! What a sense of entitlement: "Amazon should provide us with all kinds of kewl free stuff AND they should protect our privacy". Sorry.

The same goes for gmail. What, you want a gig of email space for free with no strings attached? poor baby. Go to CompUSA, buy a *250 gb* drive for ~$200, and make your own damn free mail server.

Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers".

[rainman_bc]

I dunno.... Some of the Firefox add-ons are a web developer's dream. Stuff like live http headers and the developer toolbar make life heaven... There are good browser add-ons, you just need to look at GOOD browsers :)

You have the right to not install

[PtM2300]

Personally, if an application can use my search records to provide me with more information I'm actually interested in, I'd welcome the oppurtunity. If anyone is concerned with privacy, they don't need to install it! I'm still waiting for the time to come when I don't have to watch tampon commercials on my television!

Sound off..

[Mean_Nishka]

You know, I'm really getting irritated over the outrage I'm seeing against VOLUNTARY web services. Personally I don't have a problem with using Gmail when it's available, nor do I care of Amazon tracks my searches if it makes for a better and more efficient web experience.

People are going crazy over this stuff, but they forget the fact that these services are not required. If you're paranoid and concerned that Google and Amazon are going to sell you down the river, don't use it! It's that simple.

Where's the outrage against Microsoft for allowing all of this seething spyware to install itself so easily? Likewise, where's the bad press about companies that are hawking this garbage and actively selling your information without permission? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to clean out this sludge from. Thank G-d for Mozilla!

Re:Sound off..

[orthogonal]

And, on a completely unrelated note, what is the G-d thing?

He's probably Jewish; Jewish religious law prohibits writing the L-rd's name, so the euphemism "G-d" is used instead. (Ironically, since the Hebrew language has no vowels, so presumably this circumlocution wouldn't work in G-d's "own" language."

It's very standard and not at all a personal idiosyncrasy of the poster.

As to the rest of your comment: spot on!

As a society, the U.S. (less so Europe) has acquiesced in giving up our privacy piecemeal: until lately, we suffered telemarketers to phone us in the sanctity of our homes, and we're now allowing businesses to track us as well, in order to get a "discount" on products already artificially marked up. And we allow banks and credit card companies to collect marketing data based on our purchases, without the pretense of a discount.

Hey, business isn't collecting this information on a lark, folks.

It's far from free to hand out millions of "loyalty card" and put together tracking systems and computers and databases data mining.

("Loyalty" cards? When I was a kid, you were loyal to your country and your family. Now I'm supposed to be "loyal" to a fucking supermarket? Did I mis-read the story of the minutemen? Did they lay down their lives for Safeway and 5% off assorted frozen dinners?)

So I think we can safely assume that, given the cost of all this tracking, the companies doing it have assured themselves that they'll make much more money by doing it, than it costs them to do it.

Now, since these companies are (mostly) in the business of selling products to "end-users" -- that's you, the person being tracked, or selling your data to other companies that want to market to "end users" -- again, that's you with the bar code figuratively tattooed on your ass (or for readers of the Christian Bible's Revelations, the forehead), where, exactly do you think all that money is going to come from?

Yeah, that;s right: the companies are tracking you because they mean to squeeze more -- much more, given the costs of tracking -- out of you. Either the company tracking you extracts it themselves, or the company that bought the data has to jack up their consumer prices to cover the cost of buying the data.

So in the end, after you've sold your birthright of freedom and privacy for a mess of pottage that's 20% off for "loyalty card members", after you've been tracked from mall to market to mortgage payment like a tagged animal in a biologist's field research project, after all that in the long term, you're not really going to be saving anything.

Quick, check the card they assigned you, and see if the name on it isn't "Sucker".

Re:Sound off..

[orthogonal]

You know, I'm really getting irritated over the outrage I'm seeing against VOLUNTARY web services. Personally I don't have a problem with using Gmail when it's available, nor do I care of Amazon tracks my searches if it makes for a better and more efficient web experience.

Well, of course you're right. No one is being forced to use GMail or A9. And presumably the astute (and paranoid) will read the privacy notices and avoid selling their privacy for a mess of pottage -- I mean, services.

One problem with the Libertarian Capitalistic outlook -- much as I'm sympathetic to Libertarianism, and see great values in Capitalism -- is that it requires all actors to be rational, and to have roughly the same knowledge of the "playing field". (this is why, for instance, insider trading is banned -- because it undermines the level playing field that must exist for the free market to work.)

But we have corporations that employee literally hundreds of psychologists and marketing and advertising professionals who make it their lives' work to figure out how to get disarm or misdirect our ability to be rational economic actors. And these corporations also employee lawyers and economists and lobbyists, so that the corporation, as an entity, has much more knowledge than the individual can ever hoe to have.

A small case in point: their are widespread allegations that many companies, cellular phone companies especially, intentionally overcharge customers. They idea is that many customers won't notice or won't be willing to spend hours on hold with Customer Disservice to correct the bill. And even those customers willing to pay the additional (time) cost to get their bills corrected will be giving the company interest on the mis-billed money. The interest for one little customer is miniscule, but for the company teat small bit of interest over millions of customer accounts means a significant additional revenue.

So we have people who -- according to the traditional laissez faire capitalist treatment -- are supposed to be rational economic actors, and yet we know damned well that they won't be because the companies planned ahead of time to make sure they couldn't be.

What's the damage? Well, look at AOL. Nobody was forced to use AOL, and savvy, computer literate people knew better than to pay inflated rates for substandard dial-up with a plethora of additional, in-your-face ads. So AOL got the noobs and the boobs. No skin off our elite asses, right?

Wrong! AOL's massive and massively uninformed user base hit Usenet like a tidal wave in '96, and Usenet has not to this day regained its former wit, conviviality, or usefulness. Entire 'net communities were wiped out, never to be seen again.

Or consider Gator and File-Sharing products filled with spyware. Those of us on Slashdot are savvy enough to get a GPL'd version of whatever we want on sourceforge, or to at least run AdAware after installing dome piece of crap that brings along 97 pieces of spyware and adware with it. So again, our elite asses aren't getting skinned, are they?

Wrong again! That spyware not only clogs the noobs' computers, it allows them to be compromised and turned into vectors of Trojans and engines of spamming. And we "elite" get the spam and get DDOSed and get bombarded with Trojans knocking on our ports as much as any noob.

It's sort of like keeping the environment clean: it's my vested interest to keep this environment clean, because I have to live in this environment. If the whole net, or a significant portion, is buying into something dubious, I know that sooner or later I'll feel the consequences too.

Maybe Gmail is not a threat to privacy; but if it is, I want to know that before I'm one of a handful of cranky holdouts, and all the email I get comes from, and all the email I send goes to, GMail. Because at that point, I am part of the system, whether I like it or not.

forget it

[mr_tommy]

People really need to get over these privacy concerns and actually look at real issues (DMCA, MPAA / RIAA). The media latches onto these issues because google and amazon are big names; the reality of logging is that every server does it!
Slashdot is logging us right now - via apache. We're logged / monitored throughout life, and there is ultimatly little we can do about it. Better to move onto more important issues.

Re:Google toolbar does the same

[adamontherun]

I installed a9 when it debuted last week. For me, the privacy-utility trade off has fallen on the useful side. A9 doesnt do anything that you couldnt do if you
a. searched google
b. searched Amazon's Inside the Book
c. kept a running blog to document your thoughts on all the pages you visit
used your history bar in your browser

Bringing all this functionality together in one app adds value to me.
This has worked for me in the trial phase... will have to rethink the long-term privacy implications in a couple weeks.

Media Hype?

[nial-in-a-box]

Why would there be media hype? This is the media and what they do. A simple glance at the Dilbert 2003 Weasel Awards reveals that the news media is the third weaseliest profession. Though this is by no means a scientific survey and really cannot fully support my claim, I do believe that there is some validity to those results. The media is all about sensationalizing whatever they can get their hands on, but that doesn't mean that everything this community finds important will be publicized in any fashion at all by any other news service.

This "invasion of privacy" is not really an involuntary invasion. You have to know the risks of installing such software on your machine. If you voluntarily let someone into your home, are they invading your privacy by keeping track (in any fashion) of what you happen to be doing? I say no, because by allowing them in and not having unbreakable rules then you are allowing them to at very least keep track of what they see. This all goes back to advertising and squeezing every last penny out of it. The media makes pretty much all of their money with advertising, so of course they will not investigate their own questionable procedures lest they incriminate themselves in their own publications. Just because the spyware is coming from Amazon doesn't mean that it's newsworthy. I hate it just as much as everyone else here does, but you have to understand that if they think they can make money off of it, they'll do it. Companies like Amazon couldn't care less about having every customer being happy. As long as the money keeps pouring in they'll think they're doing everything right.

oh, come on

[Knights who say 'INT]

It's not like if it was cleverly cloaked. They're pretty open about it - you're trading in some privacy for some convenience. I mean, not everyone browses porn of embarassing kinds they wouldn't like other people to see.

If it's useful enough, I could see myself thinking of installing it at the Win32 box I use at work. I mostly just look at slashdot and my webmail (hosted at my home Linux computer) anyway.

I mean, gee, there's always a trade-off between convenience and privacy. Not everyone's encrypting all their outbound email with a note on how to install PGP.

I don't get it

[symbolic]

The later incarnations of Mozilla (Firefox) have done some nice things with their search function, both for the history and browsing in general. Why would anyone want to entertain the notion of using beacon software like the Amazon toolbar? Of course, I don't buy anything from Amazon, so maybe that's another reason this isn't a big issue for me. So far, my favorite online book vendor is nerdbooks.com- nice people, great service, and NO SPYING.

Uses of history-aware search engines

[G4from128k]

A search engine that knows my browsing history could be very useful for:

1. Finding that page I saw last month. If the engine knew my history, I could limit the search to just pages in my history.
2. Finding new pages that I have never seen. This would exclude all previously seen pages from the search results. A better version would even exclude hits that had appeared in previous search hit lists. I often do multiple searches in which the Nth search finds items that I saw (and rejected) in one of previous N-1 searches.
3. Tracking lost pages. The engine could periodically check my bookmarks and relocate pages that had been moved (or find pages similar to the missing page). If the page is truely gone, I could use Google cache to snag an archival copy.
4. Automatically finding pages similar to ones that I like. If the search engine notices that I visit certain pages repeatedly (e.g., /.), it might run a search for pages that are similar to my favorite sites.
5. Social networking: Finding people that have browsing histories like me.

Yes, there are some nasty privacy issues, so one needs to pick the partner carefully (as if your ISP doesn't know your browsing history). What is interesting is that services like A9 and GMail create a new level of personalization in which the massive technological scope of an Amazon or Google is put to work for individuals.

Re:the hype is here....

[B'Trey]

Slashdot, while significant among the technorati, is a small eddy in a big pool. GMail is getting main stream hype - a senator in California is threatening legislation to prevent Google from rolling out the service. A few comments on Slashdot are not in the same league.

The concern with GMail seems to be overblown as was indicated here on /. just a couple of stories ago. The concern with A9 seems, at least at this juncture, to be quite legitimate.

It works both ways

[Graftweed]

As the old adage goes, everyone can find out what you're doing online, they just don't have any meaningful (or easy) way of linking that information to your identity.

What's happening here is that now Amazon can do just that. They already have all the details they'll ever need about you, such as name, address and credit card number(s), they just added a way to correlate all your book searches to that identity, and now apparently all your browsing history too. Is this really that valuable to the common person? Do WE need to know every book we've ever browsed or every page we've ever visited? Marketing types will no doubt love this, but seriously, how will all this information ever work for you more than to whoever is hosting it?

Re:the hype is here....

[dasmegabyte]

The irony with the "privacy concerns" over GMail or A9 is that neither is doing nothing new.

"They're reading my email!" So? The SMTP server that delivered your email read it. The Pop3/IMAP servers that display your email read it. Any spam filters or virus scanners on your email server read it. And many of these have logged the source, logged the subject, and in the case of Bayesian filters, logged keywords present in the email. Many, many computers have read your email -- but we're to be outraged that google is "diabolically" adding one more to the list?

"They're tracking my browsing!" Amazon ALREADY tracks your browsing. They follow you through every web page that has an Amazon graphic and they look up referrers to see what you like. The toolbar just makes it easier.

Honestly, guys, it's silly to get upset and threaten legislation over privacy issues with an OPTIONAL privately run service. If I want to call up Macy's and tell them everything I did today so they can suggest products I want to buy, that should be my choice. If Google and Amazon are honest about collecting this info, and people still use the service, than where's the problem? Personally, I'm less wierded out by machines offering me things automatically than I am by PEOPLE offering me things through intuition. At least no computer will ever read my spam and wonder, "What kind of a guy gets all this barnyard porn?"

Confusion?

[DuranDuran]

I'll probably burn some karma for this, but I can't help but feel that there are some out there who wave the privacy flag simply in order to justify, mask or excuse their own anti-social behaviour.

No, this isn't a troll - I just think that not every story that involves someone watching what someone else is doing shoudl have life-ending privacy concerns. In this case, you have to invite the company to watch you in the first place! If I invite, say, a plumber or electrician into my house, I'm going to have to accept the fact that they may see (shock! horror!) me going about my normal everyday business.

If some of these privacy advocates had their way, none of us would talk to or interact with anyone else *ever*.