Privacy advocates frown on Amazon snooping plan

Anyone who has an Amazon.com account knows how their system works. If you are logged in, Amazon presents you will all kinds of "suggestions", based on your browsing and buying habits, that it thinks you might like to buy. Sometimes it is kind of spooky. Most of the time to me, it is wrong and annoying. I want to look at what I want to look at, and I don't want to be bombarded with a bunch of stuff related to things I bought in the past every time I log in.

While Amazon does give you the chance to fine tune the "suggestions" by deleting things, well, that's not my job or where I want to spend my time. I once bought a country music CD and for years Amazon must have thought that I really wanted to buy mass quantites of country music. Every time I went there, I got another "suggestion". My interests are so varied that no automated system can get it right, and Amazon's routinely gets it wrong.

Now this "suggestion" business may only get "better" with this new Amazon patented gift tracking system.

Amazon, listen! There are 2 useful features your tracking system gives me. One is keeping track of things I've looked at during a session (and no longer). That way if I'm comparing stuff I can easily find the things I've already scoped out. The other is when I put something in my shopping cart, Amazon offers me a deal on that and a related item I might want -- a possible savings. Possible savings are good, especially if I really want that other item -- I'm likely to buy.

I realize that other shoppers may have other needs. What Amazon really needs to do is let us, their customers, choose from their tracking features those which are useful and allow us to leave the others behind. The ones that are offensive to me personally, will actually cause me to spend less time at the Amazon site which means that I'm less likely to see something that I want to buy. I have never bought something from Amazon that I didn't want to buy before I went to the Amazon site. Perhaps I am atypical, but it is true.

After that rant, why do I even buy from Amazon? A couple of reasons. They often have good prices. They often have what I want in stock. They usually get the order right. When they get the order wrong, they have fixed the probem in a timely manner. There are so many things I like about Amazon, but it is possible to drive a loyal customer away if the browsing experience gets too spooky. What is described in this article is, in my opinion, spooky. Not to mention the child safety issues involved, which is a very huge concern.

So Amazon, please patent the "let the customer turn off the parts they don't like" buttons. And please, please go very carefully with this next step and its potential for child exploitation.