FTC Asked to Probe Amazon.Com’s Alexa Internet Software
Computer security expert Richard M. Smith is asking the Federal Trade Commission to determine if Amazon.com’s Alexa Internet software violates a bevy of federal privacy laws ranging from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to the Electronic Communications
The software, available only in trial version and only on the Alexa Web site, monitors which sites a person visits, looks for patterns shared by individual shoppers, aggregates information about the collective navigation of Web users, to determine consumer shopping patterns while improving the quality of data available to Web site visitors.
Smith, according to published reports, filed a formal complaint with the FTC last Tuesday alleging that an examination of the Seattle-based firm’s consumer data-monitoring software determined that it is capable of gathering more personal information about Amazon’s customers than it is telling them.
There was no immediate comment from the FTC.
Smith, who drew widespread attention to the privacy practices of many large Internet companies, such as Microsoft and RealNetworks, (cq) was quoted in those reports as saying that he found the Alexa programs occasionally gather and pass on the names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses of Amazon’s Web site visitors
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Amazon subsidiary, Alexa Internet, and developer of the Alexa software, is quoted in those reports as saying that while some information is unavoidably collected from Internet users, it is not permanently stored or used to connect Web activity to an individual by name.
