Amazon Posts a Tell-All of Buying Lists

Online bookstore Amazon.com has stunned Internet privacy advocates by posting on its Web site detailed information on the books, videos and recordings purchased by employees at hundreds of companies, schools and nonprofit groups.

One example: The book that has racked up the highest sales to Walt Disney Co. workers is “Dancing Corndogs in the Night: Reawakening Your Creative Spirit.”

Well and good--but does Disney want the world to know that No. 3 on the list is “Disney, the Mouse Betrayed”? And does the world need to know that No. 6 at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center is a diet book?

“It’s fun. People can see what other people are buying,” said Amazon spokesman Paul Capelli.

Capelli said Amazon has received no complaints from companies about being included in Amazon’s Purchase Circles, which the Seattle-based company began putting up on its Web site Friday.

If companies do complain, Amazon isn’t promising to take them off the list. Indeed, Capelli said Amazon plans to expand the number of group listings, which are compiled from the server names on customer e-mails and from ZIP Codes.

But privacy advocates said the move sends the wrong message to consumers already concerned about how their Web habits are tracked, sold and used.

“In addition to being bad practice from a privacy perspective, I think it’s probably bad business,” said David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “Online companies should be making people feel comfortable about buying online.”

Disney declined to comment, as did other companies whose employees’ purchases were listed.

One can learn a lot about people from what books they read--so much that some companies may ask employees not to order from corporate e-mail accounts, some experts said.

“There are competitive, proprietary and other interests that could be trampled on,” said Deirdre Mulligan, staff counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group in Washington. “This potentially could rightly upset businesses who are concerned about what employee purchases might tell people about them.”

Amazon’s Capelli said such a reaction is unlikely.

“That sounds paranoid to me--that people don’t want people to know what videos you want,” he said. In fact, there is a law against video stores disclosing what videos consumers rent. But that doesn’t apply to aggregated information such as Amazon’s.

Amazon doesn’t sell customer information to third parties. Instead, the company uses it to tailor its own sales approach, for instance by telling buyers of a particular book what other purchasers of that book have ordered.

“People need to realize that the Internet is bringing information to people in a way that has never been done before,” Capelli said.

In addition to companies and geographic areas, top sellers are listed by government agency.

Within California state government, the Gregg Reference Manual, a classic business text, is tops. But novels fill four of the top seven spots, a much higher proportion than that shown by private companies checked at random.

Some of the rankings are hardly surprising.

The No. 1 seller at Microsoft is “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” by Chairman Bill Gates.

At Oracle Corp., the bestseller is “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation,” which a New York Times reviewer said painted the Oracle chairman as “an egomaniacal prevaricator.”

Since the information at issue in the Purchase Circles doesn’t disclose actions by individuals, Sobel said the privacy legislation currently being debated in Washington would be unlikely to affect Amazon’s gimmick.

But the practice breaks new ground by freely disclosing so much profiling information to third parties, he added.

“It illustrates the capability that Amazon has had for a long time and that some people find appealing and others find appalling: the maintenance of personal profiling that is then fed back.”