Online Purchases Can Give You Away

Abhishek writes "New Scientist reports that Retailers could guess your age, sex, birthday and wedding anniversary simply from the types of gifts purchased for you online and their timing, according to a patent granted to online retail giant, Amazon. The information could be used to remind your loved ones of an impending special occasion and offer gift suggestions. Currently Amazon makes personalised suggestions to customers based on previous purchases by that customer, previous web pages browsed and comparisons between customers who have bought similar products. But the company may vastly increase its predictive capability in the future."

*Puts on his tin foil hat*

[Anonymous Coward]

OH MY GOD!! They can find out my BIRTHDAY!! My ANNIVERSARY!! I demand PRIVACY!! Boycot RETAILERS!!

This just in: you're not important enough for anyone to give a rat's ass about you.

Costs vs. Benefits

[AthenianGadfly]

I wonder if the potential benefits would outway the possible embarrassments - I can think of lots of cases where a wrong guess could alienate customers, from reminding you to purchase a birthday gift for a loved one who has passed on to assuming someone is older than they really are. I wonder how good the software is and how subtly their guesses will be manifested to the customer.

Spam anyone?

[kryogen1x]

Amazon would remind potential gift purchasers by sending them emails or an alert when they log on to the website.

I hope they make this service optional.

You can waste this time guessing..

[yuriismaster]

... Or just ask them. As long as retailers don't ask for my social security number or other vital information, I don't mind giving up my gender, zip code, or whatever.

I know the power of data collection, and how it can influence markets. If a bunch of /.ers visited Amazon and said "Hey, I'm a [computer|history|physics] geek" then I'm sure Amazon of all people would go: "Hey, let's pitch him SnowClash, Digital Fortress, or tech books."

I personally don't want my potential anniversary date posted online (I have a female compatriot, just happen to be 17), but hell, if Amazon is willing to say "Hey numnuts, your anniversary is in a week. You better get her something!" then I'd be glad.

--

Help a poor high-schooler? [freeminimacs.com]

And some people...

[homer_ca]

Some people give away the information voluntarily like in a wedding or baby registry.

Re:I guess we will all strive to be like Data.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is SLASHDOT

That line from Jurassic park...

[mabhatter654]

reminds me of the classic line in jurassic park where the mathmatician says "you patented it, slapped it on a lunch box so exicted that you could, you didn't think about if you should"

I think that's why tech people like here at slashdot tend to be anti-technology when everybody else thinks it's great....basicly we're sickos that have already explored where pervasive stuff like this goes...but we're so far out there nobody will listen to us till it's too late. The biggest "oxymoron" I've had in that department was trying to explain why this type of techo-spying is so bad for employers and workers and such to a HR manager who has a religous Phd in administration and was a baptist minister... That showed me that even the brightest most well-intentioned people really don't understand just what they're giving away in the electronic/information era! When even the most scholared religous people don't "get it" how can you expect all the grandmas and grandpas out there to understand that we may have to stop using the internet for "everything" because to make it "safe" requires giving up too much of the personal freedom and responsibility we enshrined in the Constitution. Too many people don't really understand how and why the Constitution was written...it was written by a bunch of left-wing nut jobs...even for their time... but it was that radical thinking that made it stand the test of time...remember the politicans first attemept at the US didn't work!

Doesn't work so well

[xbradlyx]

The problem with Amazon's sugestions is that they don't know which books or cds you bought for yourself and which ones you bought for someone else. For example, I bought my mom a Mary Higgins Clark book last year and now everytime I go to Amazon I get all these recomendations for romance novels.

Amazon recommendations not good

[grahammm]

Before doing this, i think that Amazon could do well to improve their existing recommendations. Where I think they do badly is that if you buy an X, where X is something which there are several brands and/or models but which you are only likely to want one of, they recommend many alternatives which you might have considered when making the initial purchase but do not want now that you have made your purchase.

Example from personal experience include USB SD/CF etc readers and foreign language dictionaries.

there should be no patent for this

[Kergan]

This is just so weird. As far as I remember, Emile Durkheim theorized how and why it is potentially valid to do this kind of population sampling, stat crunching, and infering a century ago. And in doing so, he was mostly finishing the work that Karl Marx started roughly 50 years before him.

Why on earth should amazon be awarded a patent for reinventing sociology?

Re:Predicting the future.

[jc42]

Hmmm ... I've been impressed by the wild innacuracy of Amazon's guesses about my tastes. I've ordered lots of things from them. But when I look at their recommendations, my reaction is often "Why the @#*%$ would they think I'd be likely to buy that?"

They have a looooong way to go before their guesses are accurate.

(Of course, it may have something to do with my eclectic tastes. I recently ordered 3 CDs: one of traditional Quebecoise accordion and fiddle music, one of Chinese pipa music, and one a Grateful Dead album. I wonder if this crashed any of their software? ;-)