Slashdot Mirror
New Super-sized Customer Database for Amazon?
dtjohnson writes "Amazon.com has applied for a patent to create
an online customer database which would allegedly contain
'massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of
shoppers,
including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and
income.' From the article: "The database, which would
combine information disclosed voluntarily by
customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would
give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any
other retailer. Does this cross the privacy line or is it just
reasonable data gathering to make retail sales more responsive to
customer needs?"
Amazon's pending patent, which would bar competitors from replicating the company's process for gathering information
Let me get that right: If I have nothing to do with Amazon then no-one else can do the same thing? Looks like a small price to pay.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
wait, I thought Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Walmart, Credit card companies and the devil already built this database! Plenty of prior art.
When all else fails, try.
Yes it does.
Read radical news here
The US government can infringe any patent - they just have to pay you when they do it. I guess Amazon is going to take over the world now. Oh well.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
Five years ago I might not have had a problem with a company trying to build a database like this. Free market - find what you will and whatnot. But unfortunately, I think any responsible company has to look at today's political climate, and consider the question: given an over-reaching, probably unconsitutional, and completely illegal, but well-enforced subpoena by the government, how much damage could our data do in the wrong hands? Are we prepared to fight such an action all the way to the supreme court if it comes to that? And what if the supreme court makes a corrupt decision? Sad, really.
on privacy in order to make as much money as possible.
In EU, a private company can not ask which religion a person has. It is illegal and
most Europeans consider it a serious breach of privacy open to abuse.
As a matter of fact, in several EU states you are may deduct from the tax money paid to
a church. But many Jews does not do this because of Europe and the rest of the world's
long history of pogroms and persecutions[1]: similar registers was used to round up Jews
to murder. Europeans are aware of this, but Americans seems not.
[1] This, of course, does not excuse Israelswar crimes and human right violations.
As the recent AOL release of search queries has shown, anonymizing the user name to an random id doesn't really help a thing to keep the user identity anonymous, given a reasonable large amount of data, you can track the user based on its submitted queries.
The only real solution I see would be to forbit storage of personal data on server side and thus forcing Amazon and Co. to store it on the client side instead, so that the user is in control over what the other end knows about him and Amazon and Co. can't simply just store whatever the user submitted. This is the only way I see how the user could both stay anonymous (just delete client side data) as well as allow Amazon and Co. implement features based on users past actions.
Wondering whether or not this crosses the line is, in fact, quite irrelevant. None of the data elements mentioned in the report were gathered illegally, and theoretically, could be available to any enterprising company. We need to stop expecting companies to be any more respecting of our privacy than we have previously asked them to be.
They're using data which was voluntarily given to them by customers, and data which is publicly available on the web. If you really expect a company to not use any of this type of information for marketing purposes, you're being exceptionally naive.
The information is available, is completely legal to use, and some of it was even voluntarily given directly to Amazon by it's customers. The only thing which could ever prevent anything like this from happening in a case like this or at least limit it's use, would be to pass new laws limiting the usage of such information. Or, just don't voluntarily give information to companies if you don't want them to use it to market to you.
...
By collating data that either you've given them directly, or is publicly available from elsewhere?
Oddly, if I were to do the same thing with say FBI agents, that wouldn't go over so well, would it?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Case and Point: Those stupid cards you have to carry just to have the privalege of paying the normal price on goods at supermarkets. I go to Albertsons and up until a year ago they did not have one of these stupid cards. Then the actress who plays Raymond's wife on "Everybody Loves Raymond" comes on my TV to announce the "good news" that Albertson's is getting a club card. If she was standing in front of me when she announced that I would have punched her right in the nose. Why is it good news that I have to carry another silly useless card in my wallet or on my keychain just to be able to pay the normal prices. And for what? So Albertsons can collect demographic information on me? No thanks!
What about people who read both? Seriously, why is there this assumption that owning and reading a book somehow means you believe and accept the ideas presented therein? Some people actually like to read around and get a deep understanding of a lot of different ideas. Even if you disagree with something, you should at least understand it well instead of relying on propaganda.
Which brings me to my next point...
We might have a 20 year pause before the patent expires.
It's not a patent, it is only an application, so there is nothing that has to expire. This rather obvious concept has been explained a bazillion times on Slashdot, but almost no one posting under this article seems to understand it. You can apply for any stupid damn thing you want. Even, say, a resurrection burial tomb .
What I think would make for a great Backslash section is revisitting these old applications that give Slashdotters apoplectic fits. See if a patent is granted or if it is ultimately is abandoned. If it is granted, see how narrow or how broad the actual patent protection is. Then, there would be more informed bitching and complaining than the usual infantile "P@+3n+s are teh suxx0rs! W00+! W00+!"
Similar to the upcoming US election results