"Amazon.com Knows Too Much"

[jnicho02]

I saw this article on the BBC web site -

http://news1.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/the_company_file/newsid_432000/432040.stm<br>

<br>
It gives a fine example of the use of data mining, but are Amazon.com pushing it too far by considering publishing choices by "company the purchaser works for". Will it, as the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, thinks "....create an environment where people are afraid to go online."

 

[aalmeida]

I think it is coming to pass that people will be afraid to GO period.
Everywhere you go not only online, who you call where you used your credit card etc it has become &quot;information&quot; that we all use to think was good to find criminals trying to hide, today in the name of &quot;serving better the customer&quot; we see all this data been capture into databases, and it can and will be used.
Now nothing is &quot;your own bussines&quot;, there is now away for anybody to say &quot;mind your own bussines&quot; pretty soon they will be able to tell you what to buy and when keep in mind the phrase from the ADM CIO, few years ago, &quot;The customer is our enemy and we have to control them&quot; remember that all other CIO's present at that meeting at that moment agreed with the statement.
I think that money is becoming more important than a person interest AL Almeida
NT/DB Admin
&quot;May all those that come behind us, find us faithfull&quot;

 

[Predictor]

I was unable to read the article mentioned, but I am not sure what your concern is. Correct me if I am mistaken, but Amazon only knows what its customers tell it, right? Many consumers seem more than willing to give up all sorts of personal information. Unless one is being pressured or required to provide information, I am not sure for whom we would be conerned?

 

[aalmeida]

The problem is not to aquire the data but on how to use it without any regard to the person that gave you the information. And all around the globe you see legalized missuse of the aquired data by all kinds of companys. Just a smple for discussion: Last year in the us a banck sold customer information along with their credid card numbers to a pornographic site that started charging the customer for services they never used.
Now tell me who missused that data? where the trust on giving information was broken?
As I stated before it does not matter how the data is aquired, online, on the phone or in person it is supose to be a trust relationship that some parts of that data will be used with care, responasbility, respect and comon sense. AL Almeida
NT/DB Admin
&quot;May all those that come behind us, find us faithfull&quot;

 

[jnicho02]

I know it's a really old post, but I never explained to Predictor what the worry was about.

Amazon produce those 'also bought' lists for books. They were making the information available broken down by other fields to the extent that you might be able to identify a specific group. E.g. you could break it down by company and see that loads of IBM employees were buying a book about another company....hinting at a takeover interest?

Personally, I agree that data is there to be analysed and people should worry less. But there is always a strong civil liberties question to keep in mind. Jeremy Nicholson, Director of

http://www.firstlightassociates.co.uk

a UK-based Java and Data Warehousing consultancy

 

[aalmeida]

The Problem is not &quot;analyse&quot; the problem it is misuse of the data, it is the samething we are seeing the CEO's doing with company's books, lack of &quot;ethics&quot;? it is plain robery that's what the problem is, do we need regulations to the industry? if that would bring moral standards yes but regulations are not likely to solve it. AL Almeida
NT/DB Admin
&quot;May all those that come behind us, find us faithfull&quot;

 

[Rob999]

Call me a wrench in Amazon's system, but I always delete my cookies before I begin my browsing and then delete them again before I purchase (you've done it right when amazon asks you to &quot;sign in for your recommendations&quot; or something similar). I have a friend who bought a gift for his brother who practices an alternative lifestyle and now whenever he signs on he get a bunch of radical recommendations that really bother him. I find all of this to really only be amusing, because Amazon doesn't sell their information (I'm pretty sure). Companies are supposed to disclose what they do - or don't do - with your data.

That's where the real danger is, when they start selling your profiles to entities that you would never choose to engage with. Of course amazon's just a small, and I believe, relatively innocuous practitioner of this growing practice...