Glenn, this why I think Amzn is worth $600 million.
>In the name of convenience and safety, big business and big government keep pushing the boundaries of privacy and surveillance. Consider the latest from online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and the Super Bowl.
Trusting businesses to protect privacy is always a risk, because personal data is a valuable commodity. That's why I'm hesitant to take at face value a new Amazon service that looks quite useful -- and which, at least for now, is sensitive to privacy concerns, more so than many other e-commerce sites I can name.
On Tuesday, the company announced the ``Honor System'' -- a method for making payments to Web sites, either as voluntary contributions or payments for services or information. The Amazon service is similar in some respects to services such as PayPal (www.paypal.com), providing a way to make small payments conveniently.
On its face, the Honor System has value for Amazon, participating Web sites and Web surfers. It gives Amazon, which collects a toll for every payment, a way to capitalize on its billing system. It gives sites a relatively painless system for collecting money from users. And, as noted, it gives average folks an easy way to make payments.
But for the folks on Amazon's customer list -- some 29 million of us -- there's more to consider.
Web pages are a collection of information, including text and graphics, that are dished out by server computers. When you visit a page, the information you see in your browser may be coming from several different computers.
Third-party sites using the Honor System put notices on their pages, inviting customers or volunteers to click through to Amazon's payment pages. The notices originate from Amazon's own computers, which send them when someone is looking at the page in question.
Amazon customers may not know it, but stored on their personal computers are little pieces of software code called cookies that let Amazon identify them when they visit Amazon.com's site. This can be helpful, because it lets the company recognize a return visitor and lets customers avoid re-typing all their information when they want to buy something.
Under the Honor System, Amazon will be able to learn when its customers are visiting third-party sites using the service -- whether or not the Amazon customers click on the notice on those third-party sites. This is a fairly dramatic increase in Amazon's ability to learn things about its customers -- a windfall of information the company can and surely will use to sell things more effectively.
Amazon indicates it will keep aggregate information about its customers' visits to the participating third-party sites. But the company says it's removing individual customers' names and other potentially identifying information from any such data logs.
I'm not crazy about giving away information, even in the aggregate -- not when it's being collected without my consent in any respect. But this is life in the new world of marketing, where companies make these kinds of deals.
Amazon's promise to remove identifying information from its new database would be more reassuring if the company hadn't unilaterally changed its overall privacy policy last year. The company says it strengthened the policy. Really?
The previous policy had pretty much assured customers who requested it that their data would never be shared or sold, period. The subsequent policy said that customer data was an asset and would be treated like one if Amazon felt it necessary to sell the company or a business unit.
Amazon now tells me that if such a sale occurs, it will contact customers who'd opted out and give them the right to prevent transfer of their data. That's progress, but I'd trust this assurance more if it had been an explicit part of the new policy. Besides, who knows when the policy -- on this or the Honor System logging -- might change again?
Amazon has been on my don't-shop list for a while in any event, largely because of the company's abuse of the patent system -- a separate issue I've discussed before. In general, Amazon doesn't inspire my trust.
Governments can never be trusted to protect privacy, because law enforcement is in the business of invading it in order to catch crooks. We have a Bill of Rights, among other safeguards that in theory protect us from abuse by those entrusted to protect our safety. But technology keeps racing ahead of law and tradition.
At the Super Bowl game in Tampa 10 days ago, surveillance cameras snapped photos of everyone entering the stadium. The football fans weren't notified. Then the pictures were digitized and sent electronically to various law enforcement databases, where they were compared with photos of known criminals.
Again, on its face, you might see nothing wrong with this. We wouldn't want a terrorist to get into the Super Bowl, after all.
There's plenty wrong, actually. Civil libertarians have raised any number of questions about the way it was handled, among them whether fans should have been notified they were being placed, in effect, in a police lineup and whether Florida law required the police to save and make publicly available the photographs.
The exercise should make you shudder just a bit, because it foreshadows what's coming.
Cameras are spying on us everywhere we go these days, which is bad enough. But the ability to capture images digitally and then compare them with databases, using pattern-recognition software, means we're moving closer to an era when we'll effectively be under surveillance -- individually -- at all times in public places.
Now that's truly scary. |
