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Miscellaneous

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Aug 25th 1999 9:58am





Amazon as Big Brother

from the privacy-complaints dept

Interesting article covering the anger of some users at Amazon's new "purchase circles". It seems that some of these "circles" are created by the domain from which you order meaning Amazon knows (and displays) exactly what items everyone from a certain company is ordering. Some companies might not want the world to know what items their employees are ordering, but there is no way to opt out of the system. I think some folks are blowing this out of proportion, but it should be opt-in only.

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    Todd, Aug 25th, 1999 @ 12:18pm

    The company list is pretty small and covers only the biggest companies, so when you consider that there are lots of plain old folks at these companies ordering books, the value of the information diminishes substantially. Might be an issue if they went down to a company of 2-3 people and you could use that info to tell something about their strategic direction, but that is a big set of ifs. I can't believe this is a big deal and couldn't care less whether my info was used in this collaborative filtering.

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