A system for which Amazon has just received a patent—enabling the e-tail giant to gather hints about your gift-giving habits to suggest future gifts and reminders—is under fire from privacy advocates who have long enough held Amazon to be less than considerate of customer privacy.
Even if Amazon says they haven’t put the new technology covered by the patent into operation just yet, advocates like the Electronic Privacy Information Center are already rapping its knuckles over the new invention.
“Amazon has continued to set the low bar for privacy on the Internet,” said EPIC West Coast director Chris Hoofnagle, out of the group’s new satellite office in San Francisco. “It’s almost no longer a surprise when the company announces new ways to profile people.”
Hoofnagle and others fear the new Amazon creation could involve profiling children, not to mention “exploiting” gift-giving and the kind of community sense Amazon’s well-known customer reviews are aimed at fostering.
According to Amazon’s patent claim, the new technology would let Amazon “gather information about gift recipients, including their names, addresses and items customers send them. The system would then try to guess their gender, age and the gift-giving occasion based on the type of present, messages written in gift cards, dates gifts are ordered, items on wish lists, and commentary in related consumer reviews.”
But to observers like Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, that new technology aiming for that kind of information gathering equals a recipe for trouble.
"There's no guarantee that there won't be some disastrous privacy invasion coming out of this," said CPSR spokeswoman Karen Coyle. "That's a very big risk to take with children."
A few months earlier, the Federal Trade Commission rejected claims that Amazon already violated federal Child Online Privacy Protection Act provisions making it illegal to gather information on children without parental consent, but EPIC, CPSR, and Junkbusters founder Jason Catlett fear the new system would provoke new COPPA-related complaints.
Amazon, for its part, says the “handwringing” over the new technology is “premature,” with spokeswoman Patty Smith telling reporters that when the company submitted the patent, they wanted to be “as forward-thinking as possible as to how we might apply the technology, but it’s not something we’re currently doing.”
