Slashdot Mirror
Online Purchases Can Give You Away
Abhishek writes "New Scientist reports that Retailers could guess your age, sex, birthday and wedding anniversary simply from the types of gifts purchased for you online and their timing, according to a patent granted to online retail giant, Amazon.
The information could be used to remind your loved ones of an impending special occasion and offer gift suggestions.
Currently Amazon makes personalised suggestions to customers based on previous purchases by that customer, previous web pages browsed and comparisons between customers who have bought similar products. But the company may vastly increase its predictive capability in the future."
Demographics can be reversed!
The patent describes software that automatically guesses when a gift is being purchased by extracting key words such as "birthday" or "anniversary" from an attached message. It might also note details such as the fact that the buyer has asked it to be gift wrapped or that the recipient address is different from the purchaser address, according to the patent, which was granted on 8 March.
And people screamed over Google's ads with Gmail.
Most worrying is that the patent appears to target children, says Karen Coyle of the public interest alliance Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in Berkeley, California.
Isn't their a law regarding this? Something about consent from a parent if the child is 13 or younger?
According to Amazon spokesperson Patty Smith, based in Seattle, Washington, these worries are "a little premature and a bit speculative". She adds that the company has no plans to implement the technology at present.
For now.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
... that if it's from a man it's probably being given/ordered late?
Stop buying me those Barbra Streisand DVDs for God's sake!
Amazon.com: "It's time to purchase Rocco's true anal stories 29!"
Wife: "WTF?"
OH MY GOD!! They can find out my BIRTHDAY!! My ANNIVERSARY!! I demand PRIVACY!! Boycot RETAILERS!!
This just in: you're not important enough for anyone to give a rat's ass about you.
All you have to do is buy 'inappropriate' gifts for your friends and it'll keep suggesting more of them!
Your purchases of:
1. Childrens clothing (young female)
2. Childrens Videos (Mecha fighting robots IV)
3. 'Fairy' Wand
4. 'Young Princess' wings and headband.
Indicate that you are a 40yr old Male, Single... probably naked right now...
I wonder if the potential benefits would outway the possible embarrassments - I can think of lots of cases where a wrong guess could alienate customers, from reminding you to purchase a birthday gift for a loved one who has passed on to assuming someone is older than they really are. I wonder how good the software is and how subtly their guesses will be manifested to the customer.
Safeway has been doing this for years. Some friends of ours got a card in the mail shortly after they had a baby, congratulating them on their new addition, and offering them these fine baby products, available at Safeway. A year later they got a "happy birthday" card for the baby with some coupons and such.
Do not read this sig.
I hope they make this service optional.
... Or just ask them. As long as retailers don't ask for my social security number or other vital information, I don't mind giving up my gender, zip code, or whatever.
/.ers visited Amazon and said "Hey, I'm a [computer|history|physics] geek" then I'm sure Amazon of all people would go: "Hey, let's pitch him SnowClash, Digital Fortress, or tech books."
I know the power of data collection, and how it can influence markets. If a bunch of
I personally don't want my potential anniversary date posted online (I have a female compatriot, just happen to be 17), but hell, if Amazon is willing to say "Hey numnuts, your anniversary is in a week. You better get her something!" then I'd be glad.
--
Help a poor high-schooler?
Combine this with Geo-Targeting and it's amazing to know what web sites can find out about you without your consent.
It's like an involuntary a/s/l check from web sites you visit.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Some people give away the information voluntarily like in a wedding or baby registry.
If someone buys a casket for you, will they stop spamming you ?
What keeps me going is my inertia.
The patent describes software that automatically guesses ...
I got birthdaycards from several companies who also guessed my birthday by looking in the database. Also some emails from companies that did the same.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Data: I wish to buy a selenium-based epoxy for repairing Spot's dinner plate. Make it quick as I'm in a temporal zone.
Amazon 2501: I'm sorry, I'm not able to profile you. Please fill out these forms so we can get to know you better and allow the purchase to flow quicker (wink wink).
Data: I'm an android. I have no data profile that you can use.
Amazon 2501: Drat.
They dont have me! I don't have a wife or a girlfriend hahahahaha!!!
Haha!
Ha...
ha...
Oh. Dammit. I don't 'any' either.
I want to change demographics now.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
1. Buy an expensive gift?
2. Buy a really expensive gift?
3. Spend $50 for the special "have the invoice dated last week" HubbySaver(tm) feature?
4. Cringe in abject terror?
5. Sleep on the couch?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Not only that, but try ordering a gift subscription of "Zoobooks" for someone else's kids. I now get mail for every child's product under the sun. I'm single, and childless, and it's annoying.
However, it's only slightly less annoying than the mailing list I'm on where they've confused me with my Dad, and I get AARP and health care mail all the time.
Put them together, and somewhere, there's a database that thinks I'm a 70 year old that's having tons of kids.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
Dear short, fat, balding, over-the-hill, poorly-dressed, divorced and lonely couch-potato. We have some wonderful discounts to fit in with your special life-style....
Table-ized A.I.
Amazon already asks if you wish to receive reminder notices for events. If you make a profile, you can choose to get such notices. "Special Occasion Reminders" are listed under "Gift Services"
Actually, after browsing Amazon a bit too much over a period of years, they give me some excellent suggestions. Their predictive lists are good. I shop for me, and a husband, and 4 boys, so I suppose that anything that they list would hit one of us. I have eclectic interests, and vacillate from one hobby to another and back again. They always pop up with something that I gasp, "Ohhh! I want THAT!"
If you read the article a little deeper, the general idea is that the software system described is used to guess the purchasing habits of friends and family based on stereotypes derived from information gathered from these messages.
This is no different than someone assuming that if you are some random black guy who happens to like rap music that if you send a message to another friend with the keyword "rap" that it assumes that the recipient of that message must also like rap music.
When marketroids are allowed to segment human beings into every imaginable stereotypical group they can think of, it may be useful for making those advertising dollars a little more efficient, but the cost to society is huge in that people stop sharing similarities as they are encouraged to go retreat to their own little islands of likeminded thinkers.
It is almost like politics in America right now, where pollsters and political pundits have managed to reprogram much of the American electorate into foolishly believing that they are part of some narrowly defined group like the "religious right", or "extreme left" or that they are a "Reagan Republican" or a "NASCAR Dad".
So, instead of society being encouraged to try to create art, ideas, products, services, government programs, etc. which try to serve the public good in a general way, the only thing you see nowadays is ridiculous levels of customization in everything around us that divide people rather than unite them.
It is like people can now go to whatever news outlet they want whether it be the Communist Broadcasting Service or Fox News not to get an objective view on what goes on around the world, but rather to hear news with a distinct political spin to make themselves feel better about "being right" when it comes to their position on any given issue.
This is just another step in the corporatization of America where people voluntarily give up their freedom and rational minds by being fooled into believing that allowing corporations to create a virtual caste system through modern marketing methods is actually a good thing.
I'm buying Christmas cards tomorrow....
...that'll throw them off my trail...
I had a similar experience with HP. Somehow I got subscribed to a newsletter from visiting their website. It was mostly worthless, but I'd scan them every once in a while to keep up with their products and things.
After a time the newsletter was re-vamped, and I got something saying they would now be suggesting articles and things to based on my "preferences". Somehow I remember it was an exciting new HP AI technology they were testing, and HP would be offering it to their business customers.
At first, the suggested articles weren't very "personalized" and wading through a bunch of suggested articles that seemed to have nothing to do with my interests made me want to unsubscribe.
All of a sudden, though, I began getting suggested articles like "Don't you think Linux sucks? Click here to read more" that would actually link to articles on the HP website talking about how Windows had a better ROI or something. Although the articles were real, the "suggestions" that pointed to the articles were obviously computer generated or pieced together from a list of pre-generated phrases.
Needless to say, I've since unsubscribed to this most unhelpful service. I'd like to take this opportunity to give an obligatory "fuck you, Carly".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I ordered a gift from Victoria's Secret once. Now they send me their catalogues all the time. I really don't mind.
My dot-com experience was with a company that administers a loyalty program. We would collect data from all of our partner businesses, and attach them to persons using the credit card numbers.
From there we had simple heuristics to look for paterns (activity at a catering establishment and a purchase at a bridal shop?) and sell these profiles back to partner businesses for targeted advertisement.
Outside of only paying in cash, and never using your legitimate information except where absolutely essential, I can't see much way to avoid it. Way things are going, it'll only get worse unless we enact legislation to prohibit that kind of activity.
I usually had 2 different pairs of gold earrings, at least 4 kitchen appliances (the most obscure you could think of - stuff like spice grinders and $250 coffee makers), and a power tool (usually a router or circular saw). They were all SO random that we were making drinking bets and stuff on what would come up next.
I see that Amazon seems to have discontinued that service... wonder why.
I think we're all missing something important, here: It's a patent.
This means that ONLY Amazon is allowed to ruthlessly invade your privacy.
So all you have to do is not shop at Amazon and you'll be safe from the data miners forever!
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
They probably got your info from the phone company. They teleco's sell all the info they have on you to anyone with the bucks. I always get my phone number listed in the name of an imaginary roommate (because it is free versus paying for an unlisted number which is not really all that unlisted) and you would be surprised all the weird stuff my imaginary friends have received in the mail over the years.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think that's why tech people like here at slashdot tend to be anti-technology when everybody else thinks it's great....basicly we're sickos that have already explored where pervasive stuff like this goes...but we're so far out there nobody will listen to us till it's too late. The biggest "oxymoron" I've had in that department was trying to explain why this type of techo-spying is so bad for employers and workers and such to a HR manager who has a religous Phd in administration and was a baptist minister... That showed me that even the brightest most well-intentioned people really don't understand just what they're giving away in the electronic/information era! When even the most scholared religous people don't "get it" how can you expect all the grandmas and grandpas out there to understand that we may have to stop using the internet for "everything" because to make it "safe" requires giving up too much of the personal freedom and responsibility we enshrined in the Constitution. Too many people don't really understand how and why the Constitution was written...it was written by a bunch of left-wing nut jobs...even for their time... but it was that radical thinking that made it stand the test of time...remember the politicans first attemept at the US didn't work!
The problem with Amazon's sugestions is that they don't know which books or cds you bought for yourself and which ones you bought for someone else. For example, I bought my mom a Mary Higgins Clark book last year and now everytime I go to Amazon I get all these recomendations for romance novels.
Amazon makes personalised suggestions to customers based on previous purchases by that customer...the company may vastly increase its predictive capability in the future.
Given Amazon's unerring ability to recommend only books that already own, I imagine this means that they will begin recommending the ones that I have just added to the cart.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I suspect this would fall foul on the European data protection laws. If I have no business relationship with (say) Amazon, they have no right to collect my personal information. The fact that someone else buys a thing for me does no give *my* consent to keep info on me, to spam me, or to inform other people about my private life, like anniversaries.
In Murphy We Turst
Before doing this, i think that Amazon could do well to improve their existing recommendations. Where I think they do badly is that if you buy an X, where X is something which there are several brands and/or models but which you are only likely to want one of, they recommend many alternatives which you might have considered when making the initial purchase but do not want now that you have made your purchase.
Example from personal experience include USB SD/CF etc readers and foreign language dictionaries.
This is just so weird. As far as I remember, Emile Durkheim theorized how and why it is potentially valid to do this kind of population sampling, stat crunching, and infering a century ago. And in doing so, he was mostly finishing the work that Karl Marx started roughly 50 years before him.
Why on earth should amazon be awarded a patent for reinventing sociology?