Melville House Books

Privacy experts are becoming increasingly alarmed that Amazon.com “is getting dangerously close to becoming Big Brother with your credit card number,” reports Allison Linn in an Associated Press wire story that ran in numerous newspapers yesterday. (In The New York Post, for example, it ran under the headline “Amazon.com: Lil’ Helper or Big Brother?”). Linn notes that “For years, Amazon has collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others or even wished someone would buy them.” But now, many privacy advocates feel Amazon has “crossed the line,” says Linn. Two new developments have them particularly concerned: Amazon has “launched a Web search engine, called A9, that can remember everything you’ve ever searched for,” and its development of a website called 43 Things, which seeks to set up social networking communities made up of “people with similar goals, such as getting out of debt.” Critic Karen Coyle of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility “worries that the technology would be used to gather information on children, perhaps violating a federal law that limits the gathering of information on kids under 13.” Others observe that people would never allow such information gathering in real-world retailing. Jason Catlett of Junkbusters says simply, “People need legal rights to see the profiles that are built about them and to change or delete what they want.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.