Question: Privacy Policies: Did Someone Say Privacy?

These days an online merchant is likely to have a privacy policy posted on its site that describes, among other things, what data it collects and how they are used. For example, Amazon.com's Privacy Notice states "Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others."47 The information it automatically collects includes "login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time-zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform; purchase history ...; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our website, including date and time; cookie number; [and] products you viewed or searched for." It also receives information such as "account information, purchase or redemption information, and page-view information from some merchants with which we operate co-branded businesses." A partial list of such businesses includes "Starbucks, OfficeMax, American Apparel, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, J&R Electronics, PacSun, Eddie Bauer and Northern Tool + Equipment." The Notice further acknowledges that its site includes third-party advertising and links to other websites. It then states, "We do not have access to or control over cookies or other features that advertisers and third party sites may use, and the information practices of these advertisers and third-party websites are not covered by our Privacy Notice." Having read the materials in this section on data mining, pause and think now about the vast amount of personal data you now know is compiled and stored by various entities- Internet vendors, social media sites, and aggregators, but also phone companies and such traditional institutions such as banks and employers. Now consider the ramifications of the fact that anything stored can likely be stolen. For example, Google is one of the strongest, most technically sophisticated Internet companies in the world, but even it cannot prevent covert cyberattacks on its systems. Neither can Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Bloomberg, the International Monetary Fund, the FBI or the Pentagon, all of which have acknowledged that their systems have suffered successful attacks. Indeed, the opening lines of a recent New York Times article were, "The question is no longer who has been hacked. It's who hasn't?"48

Question

How would you rate the privacy protections available to individuals who purchase items through Amazon.com? How safe are similar data of individuals who have never purchased an item through Amazon.com?