Amazon Rethinks Purchase Circles 57
Dredd13 writes "Amazon.Com announced today that they are rethinking their position on Purchase Circles. They are going to permit people to remove their purchases from being added to Purchase Circles, as well as allowing companies to opt-out of the Purchase Circle listings. Personally, I think that it should be explicitly opt-in for companies, because it is far too easy for a company to have its secrets unknowingly leaked to the world via its book purchases. If a precedent is set allowing Amazon.Com to do this, then before a company allows purchases from an online retailer, they may have to spend time and energy researching the company making sure silly things like Purchase Circles don't affect them. " Opt-out sure is an interesting choice. I know one of my old employers is actually quite upset by the whole idea of purchase circles.
That didn't take long (Score:1)
Par for the course from Spamazon (Score:1)
Spying on the government (Score:2)
I think government purchases are supposed to be totally open, so I don't think about can really complain about being able to see what was sold to
And I kind of like having the tables turned on the mega-corporations. When I think of the possible profiles they can build on me, what's the harm with seeing what their buying habits are like? Plus it's funny seeing that the #4 book to Ford is about how Chrysler got to be the hottest car company (or something like that).
At the very least, it might make the big corporations a little more sensitive to the privacy concerns of their customers. But then again, if there's a buck to be made...
And for all the consipracy buffs out there, any guesses why Amazon did this? I don't think it would take a psychic to predict people would have a problem with this.
-EC
Spamazon has always been opt-out (Score:3)
I've refused to shop at Spamazon for quite some time due to their penchant for spamming. Cases in point go back at least as far as early 1998 [internetworld.com] and are widely documented on Dejanews.
A better write-up of their business practices can be found at the page of Peter Seebach [plethora.net], a long-time n.a.n-a.e (news.admin.net-abuse.email) regular.
Finally, there's Spamazon's practice of shilling for themselves on USENET - an "astroturf" campaign eerily reminiscient of Micros~1's "independently-written letters to the editor" stunt. (Available through Dejanews - Start here [deja.com] or search for Message-ID <3584e5cc.1368345@news.sirius.com>.
While I'm as disgusted at the "purchase circles" idea as anyone, I'm not at all surprised. Spamazon doesn't think in terms of customers; merely in terms of targets for additional marketing. Take your business elsewhere. (Many on n.a.n-a.e have recommended Powell's [powells.com]. I concur.)
Best way to opt out? (Score:1)
Shop at Barnes and Noble, the store not the
"online" version.
It is interesting to look at what is being
bought. The DVD version of Dr. Strangelove
placed 9th in my little home town. That's
cool!
Checked my last employer, "Digital Signal Processors Demystified" placed first. Sounds
like a cool book and software.
I do (Score:3)
Re:I do (Score:2)
Actually corporations have the exact same rights. Corporations are basically considered a person.
First off, the original poster wasn't saying that corporations don't have the same right of privacy, he was saying they shouldn't. There's a big difference.
Secondly they are and they aren't considered people under the law. They are granted the same rights as a person, and then a few extra rights as a corporate entity, yet they have less responsibilities, and are subject to less punishment for wrongdoing. When was the last time you saw a company go to jail for fraud or theft? Go to jury duty? Vote (yes, they buy votes for their candidates, but they don't vote directly)?
Personally, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. A company is not a person, it is an organization. Organizations cannot be given the same responsibilities as people, therefore they should not be given the same rights.
----
Interesting choice of market data (Score:1)
Re:Spying on the government (Score:1)
It's NOT "government" purchases, it's purchases to people who happen to have a .gov address. The same is true of the corporate purchase circles. They aren't tracking what the corporations are buying, just what employees who work there buy.
And for all the consipracy buffs out there, any guesses why Amazon did this?
Duh. Maybe people told them they would stop buying from them. They probably also got a couple of letters from legal depts at various corporations who don't like to be used as spokesmen for Amazon.
Whenever I use my employers email, I always include (as per company policy) a disclaimer that says that I do not speak for them. Now Amazon comes along and claims that everyone at Ziff-Davis really likes to read "Memoirs of a Geisha". Really, it's #2! Sickos.
Now, it looks to ME like Ziff-Davis is advertising for both Amazon and for "Memoirs of a Geisha" and, even more embarrassing, Tom Brokaw's book! And ZD doesn't even get paid for this humiliating ad.
What's really upsetting... (Score:1)
Not only that, but neither my company [daytons.com] nor our two largest competitors have purchase circles. What a bunch of illiterate morons we are.
Rupert
Re:I don't see the big deal (Score:2)
Ok, SOME of these might actually be the "corporate" purchases. But they can't be distinguished. Do you really think the PG&E bought its employees "Who Moved My Cheese" as part of their severance package?
Microsoft (Score:1)
There's something almost surreal ... (Score:2)
It makes me feel this is just a trial balloon, so if this concerns you, be sure to keep those cards and letters coming.
D
----
Re:Best way to opt out? (Score:1)
Walmart of the book world. Support local booksellers (see BookWeb.org [bookweb.org], the American Booksellers Association site) and libraries. An organization of independent booksellers serves effectively the same purposes and goals as Slashdot: peer equivalency, idea exchange, and independence.
Re:I do (Score:1)
When Company A buys a service from Company B, this is a private transaction. Company B isn't going to announce the transaction unless Company A gives them permission. You don't say "FrogData spent $100,000 on our software product" in a press release unless FrogData says it's cool. Quite frequently, FrogData turns you down, because they don't want to give information to their competition, because they don't feel like publicly endorsing your product, or because the marketing director had a bad weekend.
Endorsements are a favor one company does another; they aren't a guaranteed part of doing business. Amazon is trying to make it look as if Oracle, Microsoft, and so on, are endorsing Amazon's services. They aren't. They're using Amazon's services, which is a different matter entirely.
Nobody would do business with a headhunter if they ran ads in the trade press saying "FredCO hired 57 MUMPS / OS/360 experts from us; why don't you do the same?" Amazon's telling the world which books a company's employees buy falls into the same basket. We don't have to invoke rights when we can invoke the power of the marketplace.
Re:Spying on the government (Score:1)
Duh. Maybe people told them they would stop buying from them. They probably also got a couple of letters from legal depts at various corporations who don't like to be used as spokesmen for Amazon.
I understand why they stopped. Why did they do this in the first place? I'm no Kreskin, but I could have told them that this would not be generally well received.
-EC
The important thing here ... (Score:2)
This kind of "sunlight is the best disinfectant" policy in action is one of the brightest hopes I've ever had for the Net. It's wonderful to see it in action. The moral of the story is: KEEP BEING OUTRAGED and ACTING ON YOUR IMPULSES TO EMAIL OFFENDING PARTIES! Hey...we all helped make at least some differences in the whole RedHat IPO/E*Trade situation. Now this.
We're those people on the Internet that Congress was warned about! *grin*
Power to the E-ple.
Re:Interesting choice of market data (Score:1)
Why spy? (Score:1)
One word: Clueless. Really, I think that's all there is to it. Clueless in a Big Way.
According to the original Wired article, they thought it would be "fun".
From letter to me when I told them I would no longer purchase their, THEY seemed surprised. They must have thought I didn't understand that these were aggregate invasions of privacy, not personal ones.
I suspect it was letters from legal depts threatening action on behalf of the companies whose names were being used that had a far bigger effect. I mean, look at what their reaction to the outrage was: the absolute LEAST they could possibly do, probably just enough to avoid lawsuits...
Too little too late in my book. (Score:1)
Someone mentioned Powels (sp?) elsewhere, and there is fatbrain, but what else is there? I must say that having books and DVDs on one site was pretty kickass, but 800.com seems to be the best DVD place. Are there any other sites besides the wicked evil amazon that do DVD/Books/Toys?
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
I'm still missing something... (Score:2)
I would like for some folks to explain why publishing (regional) summary sales data is a Bad Thing.
Have any x-number of
1)The Silicon Boys
2) Nudist on the Late Shift: And other true tales of Silicon Valley.
3)The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
4)Cryptonomicon
5)Memoirs of a Geisha
6)Burn Rate: How I survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet
7) The Beach
8) Turn of the Century
9) Our Dumb Century {"Holy f-ing Cow! Man lands on f-ing Moon! haha}
10) Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: Encore w/ Claudine
...does everybody get the same results for San Fran (the city, not metro)?
"Semi-Solid" evidence like this is a foggy stained-glass window into a company's state of being, not an open window, and I doubt that AMZN is pulling the feature due to customer feedback.
Re:Interesting choice of market data (Score:1)
Reason: Good Marketing (Score:1)
It reminds me of an old Bloom County cartoon. Oliver Wendell Jones is sitting in front of the TV that is announcing that (paraphrased) "You are a major dork weenie if you don't have a Captain Death action figure!" His mother, horrified, goes to his father to complain who is also watching TV and being told "You are a major bolchevik weenie if you don't vote for Senator Biggums". (again, I've paraphrased - the cartoon is better).
How does that apply to Amazon? Go check out Microsoft. If you want to be widely successfull like Microsoft, you should be reading TechBook, Second Edition just like them! Buy it now (even if you never would have thought to by yourself)! Say... everyone else in my town is reading LameStory... what am I missing out on? Buy it now! Etc, etc...
Corporations have too many rights already! (Score:1)
On the other hand, I think the old policy was just bad business. By not allowing corporations, or individuals which make up those corporations, to opt out of these circles, amazon is giving corporations, who will clearly want to maintain some secrecy, only one way of doing so: halting all business with amazon.
Re:DVD pricesearch (Score:1)
basically, you build a list of things you want, and you click a button, and it compares prices at the major internet sites and tells you where you can get the set cheapest. it takes shipping into account for determining the cheapest site, and you can have it "break up" the order to get a better overall price by using multiple vendors. You can also have it exclude certain vendors (hint, hint).
IMHO this just totally rocks! I've found other sites that do single item comparisons, but this is the first site I've found that does multiple items at once (and takes shipping cost into account).
just think if you could do this at pricewatch...you could select all of the components you want in your system, and then have it figure out where to buy them.
Maybe something to do with M$? (Score:1)
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
book/CD price searcher... (Score:1)
Purchase Circles is a Lie (Score:1)
I saw the top books on every enterprise was bestsellers, nothing strange.
Then Amazon didn't show anything, Amazon would
show something with a complete list of Books, no the firsts.
Purchase Circles is a Lie.
A stupid Lie.
Why is this bad? (Score:1)
Maybe they had read my Email... (Score:2)
Here's the contents:
--------------------
Dear Amazon:
I should let you know that this new feature has been posted on Slashdot, an online forum for "geeks", where this is sure to raise some eyebrows about privacy conserns. You are sure to get a lot of knee-jerk reaction about this, so I thought I'd try to present a more balanced statement.
I realize that profiling goes on all the time. The value of profile data is extremely high from a marketing perspective, and I find it interesting that you are releasing this information to the public at large. Amazon.com has
always been innovative in my mind, and this seems to continue the to idea that you "buck the trend."
What I think needs to be done in any case is to update your privacy policy to include a clause about what and how you use profiling information. As it reads right now, it could be misread that you are breaking your own policy by offering such a service. Also the clarification would be helpful for many of us with privacy conserns, and perhaps a method for the die-hards to opt out.
I applaud amazon.com for it's openess with profile information, after all, it can be useful to consumers as well - but I think your policies need to be ironed out a little more.
Sincerely,
Michael Wilkinson
Amazon.com customer
What's the big deal? NYT does it too. (Score:1)
Yay! (Score:1)
Re:No more Amazon for me. (Score:1)
If you truly believe that other stores aren't keeping this kind of information on you, you're sadly mistaken. Amazon is just being honest and open, and is allowing you to see and make use of their data in new and novel ways. Bravo for them.
I agree (Score:1)
Re:No more Amazon for me. (Score:1)
Let's think about this (Score:1)
I am glad that Amazon gave corporations the ability to opt out. To do otherwise is borderline ethically and downright rude.
Point 2:
I hope few corporations decide to opt out. I think companies have a lot more to gain by having this information public than they have to lose. The competitive intellegence gathered this way is really weak (Intel employs a lot of geeks! Microsoft workers are a bunch of toadies!), but the benefits to that company's culture can be huge. New employees can come to grips with a company's mindset much more quickly by reading their company's top 10. Managers might even be able to get a clue about what their geeky employees are thinking about.
Summary:
The net is changing all the rules. We should be vigilant about privacy issues, but also be ready to benefit from these kinds of aggregations. We might get more from them thean we give up.
BTW, has anyone else noticed how really nimble Amazon is? When the net disagrees, they can change direction in a day.
--Tim
It took long enough. (Score:1)
Long enough for me to set up a crawler to download the entire Purchase Circle portion of their website, sans images. Which is what I did, and I'm sure I'm not alone, as soon as the original story was announced on Slashdot a few days ago.
Why? Oh, nothing sinister -- I just thought (1) it would be interesting (not important, just interesting) data to have, and (2) I knew Amazon would back down and start pulling at least some of it off the web as soon as the privacy guys started going nuts. So, they can pull it down now if they want, but since they already let the cat out of the bag, that data is as good as public.
Robot.txt? What's that? :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Settle down, Beavis (Score:1)
Dude, while I appreciate your enthusiasm, this wasn't even close to being the first time. Back in 1996, Lexis-Nexis met the wrath of The People when they put up a service to let subscribers look up other people's social security numbers. Not that I'm claiming that that was the first time, either, just that it predates this Amazon episode by a good three years.
Just as an aside, we really don't have that much privacy, anyway. Just check out http://www.pretext.com/nov97/featu res/story1.htm [pretext.com] for some good evidence of it, as well as some of the facts of the oft-misreported Lexis-Nexis P-TRAK story.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Re:What's the big deal? NYT does it too. (Score:1)
Despite claims to the contrary, Amazon are publishing results for some very tiny domains. So let's suppose I'm the only woman at ten-person-company.com. Which one of us is likely to have placed the order for, say, _Jane's Guide to Uterine Fibroids_? Or maybe _Wondering If You're A Lesbian_?
I don't order my books as an employee; I don't want them to be listed against my employer's name.
City or town listings seem generally harmless, but what if you live in a REALLY small place?
side note: corporate death penalty (Score:1)
Quite the powerful concept, when you consider that the status quo is to let the company do bad and then punish them with fines. The fines don't always prevent bad future behavior, unless they are bankrupting.
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/charter/deat
Re:That didn't take long (Score:1)
Re:The important thing here ... (Score:1)
Cheers Andrew