Amazon.com customer profiling has privacy advocates on the alert

• Post a review of a book or other product on Amazon.com, and the information may find its way into the company's file on you.
• That's one key feature, anyway, of a system Amazon has invented to gather clues about customers' gift-giving habits in order to suggest future gifts and reminders.
• The company was granted a patent last week for the system, which also profiles gift recipients and guesses their age, birthday and gender.
• Amazon says it hasn't put the "systems and methods" covered by the patent to use, so it isn't monitoring customer review pages yet.
• But that fact gives little comfort to consumer advocates, who have hounded Amazon for years over its customer-profiling practices.
• Amazon has been granted a patent for a system that gathers clues from reviews about customers' gift-giving habits in order to suggest future gifts and reminders.
• Consumer advocates worry that the company's profiling practices may have gone too far and could exploit the giving of gifts and the sense of community that customer reviews were designed to engender.
• This latest invention is yet further cause for concern, because it could involve profiling children and exploit the giving of gifts and the sense of community that customer reviews were designed to engender, advocate groups said.
• Here's how the proposed system works, according to Amazon's patent claim: Amazon would gather information about gift recipients, including their names, addresses and items customers send them.
• The system would then try to guess their gender, age and the gift-giving occasion based on the type of present, messages written in gift cards, dates gifts are ordered, items on wish lists, and commentary in related consumer reviews.