By Rachel Chalmers
Amazon.com Inc has provided an opt-out for people and companies who don’t necessarily want the world to know what books, music and videos they or their employees purchase online. Amazon’s Purchase Circles were originally devised as a new way of slicing bestseller lists according to geography and industry. But companies and privacy groups were quick to protest the new feature. Why? Because it allowed casual browsers to discover, for example, that Marsha Sinetar’s career change self-help book Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow is a smash hit at Andersen Consulting – a fact which is not exactly flattering to Andersen’s HR department. More seriously, activists have expressed fears that the purchase circle bestseller lists could be tracked over time to yield potentially valuable competitive intelligence.
The situation is a little easier for ISPs than it is for ordinary companies. Amazon sorts purchases by domain, so that while the entries for Intel Corp will accurately reflect the interests of Intel employees (Linux device drivers, interesting enough), the America Online Inc purchase circle merely reflects the preoccupations of the AOL user population. For its part, Amazon points out that no purchase circle contains fewer than 200 users, so the information is abstracted away from individual purchases. That hasn’t placated the company’s critics, who say Amazon never asked permission to use the data in the first place.
Finally, Amazon responded to the criticism by allowing individuals and companies to withhold their data from the Purchase Circle bestseller lists. Privacy is of utmost importance to our customers and to us, said product development director Warren Adams. Some customers have expressed concerns, so we’re letting people decide individually. For his part, CEO Jeff Bezos defended the Purchase Circles as an experiment. Amazon.com must continue to be an innovative pioneer, and pioneers inevitably create some controversy, he said. The one thing that we’d like everyone to know is that even as we explore the unknown, we’ll always be trying to do the right thing, and we’ll always be listening to our customers.
