Amazon.com Revises its Customer Privacy Policy
Computerworld is reporting that Amazon.com has revised its customer privacy policy. Reportedly, the policy change is intended to clarify which data is collected from customers and what it does with that data. In a relatively unique development, Amazon.com also attempts to give customers an idea of what it would do with their information in the event of various major changes in its corporate structure or governance.
Reaction to the privacy policy changes was mixed. For instance, on Slashdot, the story questions a company's right to transfer its customer database to an acquirer. This was an issue in the Toysmart case, but that was a bankruptcy auction.
A lot of people seem to have weird reactions to mergers and acquisitions in the e-commerce space. After all, how many stories were posted on Slashdot when Bank of America merged with Nationsbank? Wasn't that also a customer database transfer?
Jeff Bezos reportedly said, "In revising
our privacy policy, we tried to take into consideration not only our
current activities, but also those things we could imagine possibly
happening in the future." We see no issues with trying to do that.
Of course there is a lot of information incorporated in Amazon's privacy policy. We reserve judgement on whether it is, in fact, a diminution of Amazon's customers' rights. But in our view, a lot of the commentary elsewhere on the Web looks like snap judgements.