Amazon wants to put your Intimate details online

[mandy]

Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.

The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer.

The Seattle-based company, with 59 million active customers, said it has no immediate plan to implement such a program. Its ability to do so emerged in a detailed patent application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, disclosed Thursday.

A privacy expert said customers should be wary about Amazon having the capability to gather such a large amount of detailed information...

full article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/2...zon10.html

Abstract of patent Amazon applied for:

Providing gift clustering functionality to assist a user in ordering multiple items for a recipient

Abstract

A method and system for creating of gift clusters of multiple items in a client/server environment by users, and for the ordering of such user-defined gift clusters of multiple items. In particular, a user can specify multiple items to be associated together as a gift cluster, and can also specify a variety of descriptive information about the gift cluster. That user or another user can then order the gift cluster as a gift for themselves or for another recipient, and may also order the gift cluster for the same or different recipients multiple times. The descriptive information can provide various information about how the gift cluster is to be used, and can also assist the user or others in identifying when the gift cluster is appropriate for a recipient. When customers are later searching for appropriate gift clusters, the various categorization or other descriptive information can then assist is identifying appropriate gift clusters. The gift clustering functionality may be provided by and work in conjunction with a particular item ordering service, or instead may work independently from any particular item ordering service.

full patent application: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060178946%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060178946&RS=DN/20060178946

[BellisimaJ.]

Such a database would include the gender, date of birth, interests, occupation, education, income level, residence, race and ethnicity of customers for Amazon's "gift clustering" program

A privacy expert said customers should be wary about Amazon having the capability to gather such a large amount of detailed information.

She said the data could end up in the hands of the myriad retailers that do business with the company, or with government officials or hackers.

Wow. This is causing me to consider anonymous surfing and and to reconsider as to whether I really want to buy online. These companies should not have the right to gather this type of detailed info.This really sucks.