It's Just Data

As privacy issues continue to concern nearly everyone, gay and lesbian consumers in particular may be curious to know that the net’s largest retailer, Amazon.com, would like to know more about you.

In a report last week, the Seattle Post Intelligencer revealed Amazon is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and income.

Do you ever wonder why everyone is trying to collect as much data as they can? You order something online and you are asked questions about your personal life that seem to have nothing to do with your actual purchase. Another thing that creeps me out is the collection of data that you are never told about. For example, I shop occasionally at CVS Pharmacy and Stop & Shop. At both stores, if you show them your card, they will scan it. This of course allows you to get discounts on certain items.

In the case of CVS, they will print out coupons that you can redeem within a certain time period (usually only two weeks or so). But, you are usually given coupons that are relevant to you. They are relevant because some computer has analyzed your buying patterns and it knows what you like and what you don’t like. The Stop & Shop computer also knows what I cook. I did think it was strange that I got a brochure with soup recipes in it from Stop & Shop, after buying ingredients on several occasions for different soups I was going to make. I mean, how would a program take the information from a bunch of different ingredients and assume that I was going to make soup from those ingredients?

Soup is fairly harmless. Aside from the annoying brochure, which falls under my “junk mail” category, it has made me wonder about all the other information out there that is just floating around on all of us. What if someone had less than stellar motives in how that data was to be used? I’m not talking about the crooks that we all know are lurking in cyberspace. I’m talking about all the data that corporate America is collecting on all of us.

But it’s safe right?

The Seattle-based company, however, said it has no immediate plan to implement such a program, and was quick to issue statements assuring customers that their information would be kept private.

“Amazon is always careful how it uses customer data so the customer experience will be as good as it can be,” Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith told the paper.

Right.... I’m sure they will keep it safe. After all, data is never stolen. Although, occasionally, mistakes do happen.

AOL recently published a list of more than 650,000 user queries that revealed names, addresses and Social Security numbers, and the company this week apologized and removed the data. It is unknown how many copies of the sensitive information were made.

Source information