Have you seen the story at wired.com ("Big Brother, Big Fun at Amazon") on
the Amazon.com Purchase Circles?
What happens is that Amazon aggregates the book purchases from various
domains and then publishes the data on its Purchase Circle.
For example, anyone can see what Harvard Business School domain
name purchasers buy or the hot amazon purchases made by people with
the microsoft.com domain. Kinda scary really. Any day now amazon will post
what your domain purchasers buy. It's a more serious matter for
businesses, for example, a lot of folks will be interested in seeing that
intel.com folks are buying a lot of books on the Linux operating system,
but it is a serious privacy issue for all of us.
Laura
Laura J. Orr-Waters
Senior Reference Librarian
Lillian Goldman Library
Yale Law School
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520-8215
203-432-7535
203-432-9692 (fax)
laura.orr@yale.edu (email)
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