Amazon

Well I’ve finally given in and set up my wishlist at Amazon. I’ve previously avoided Amazon because of what I consider to be their rather dodgy privacy practices (not to mention their attitude to patents). For example, from their site’s privacy statement (my comments in brackets, and emphasis added in bold):

We are committed to protecting your privacy. We use the information we collect on the site to make shopping at Amazon.co.uk possible and to enhance your overall shopping experience.

(Fine, I have no problem with this, as it enables them to offer lots of useful features to their customers, such as wishlists, personalised recommendations, etc.)

We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may choose to do so in the future with trustworthy third parties…

Er, so basically they’re saying “all the personal information we have on you is completely confidential and will never be given to anyone else. Oh, unless we get an offer that’s too good to refuse and change our minds”! This effectively cancels out their entire privacy policy. And how will we know if they decide to flog their customers personal information to some big, bad corporation?

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page…

So they won’t even contact existing customers to let them know. I mean, how many people regularly check the small print in the privacy policy? The one concession they do make is this:

…but you can tell us not to by sending a blank e-mail message to never@amazon.co.uk

Well, that’s something I suppose. But it’s still an “opt-out” system, whereas any decent privacy policy uses an “opt-in” system, where people have to explicitly give permission to have their information given to third parties.

But why does this matter anyway? Who cares if Amazon (or any other shop for that matter) sells customer information to someone else? Well I do. Companies could make a great deal of assumptions about you based on your purchases. For example, say you were writing a thesis on the impact of AIDS on the gay community, and needed to buy some reference books on the subject. The shop stores your name, address and apparent interest in AIDS and homosexuality in its database. A few weeks later, they sell this database to a large marketing company that specialises in “profiling” individuals in order target advertising to their particular tastes. Six months later, you decide to take out life insurance. Unbeknownst to you, the insurance company has purchased the profiling database from the marketing company, and immediately concludes from this information that you are gay and at high-risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. So by just purchasing a few books, you may find yourself having to pay a great deal more for life insurance, if you can get it at all.

Sexual orientation and life insurance are just one example — it could be your religious views that put off a potential employer, or political or social interests that mean you can’t get a visa to enter a particular country. Maybe purchasing a Cyprus Hill CD will mark you out as a potential drug user, or perhaps buying a book of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s still lifes will flag you up as someone into weird S&M… the implications are enormous.

Of course, this is a purely hypothetical situation at the moment, and (covers arse) as far as I know, Amazon behaves totally ethically with its customers’ details. But it just goes to show how important online (and conventional off-line for that matter) privacy is. But don’t let that stop you buying me some goodies — just fire off an e-mail to never’amazon.co.uk and then pop over to Amazon anyway. I promise there’s nothing controvetial on my wishlist…

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