Clueless in Seattle
Amazon is a good company. I use them and so do 59 million other people and we do so because they give us good value for our money, they do so expeditiously and competently and most of all we trust them because they don't give us nasty surprises.
Well, scrap the last one. A Seattle newspaper just published some details of recently public Amazon patent application. The patent protects a process of data gathering that the company apparently plans to do, consolidating personal information on all of their users, not limited to just book purchases, but including ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation.
The patent itself is here.
The patent application talks about "gift clustering" and is obviously intented as a defensive extension of their current wish-list functionality. Still, it's another step down the road towards routine privacy intrusion through profiling. Amazon's dream function would be to place your gift orders for your friends as soon as you think about it, taking all of the work off of your plate to figure out the right present. By using sophisticated analysis routines, fueled by exhaustive and intrusive data bases, Amazon will be able to predict, based on demographics and historical trend analysis, what your friends would like, even if you yourself are clueless.
At that point, are they really that different from intelligence agencies, trying to spot potential terrorists at the first gleam of the subversive idea light bulb over their evil little heads?
Profiling is harmful to our privacy, if for no other reason, than because it forces the creation of disturbingly complete consumer databases, which may be acquired by others, legally or not, and used to our detriment.
Posted on August 14, 2006
