Nick Eaton reports: A class-action lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges Amazon.com fraudulently circumvents users’ Web-browser privacy settings to collect personal information without permission and share it with other companies. The suit says Amazon tricks Microsoft’s Internet Explorer into thinking the e-retail site is “more privacy-protective than it actually is,” and uses a clever work-around to collect…
Category: Business
Chase Ignores Domain Name Whois Privacy, Sends Credit Card Offers to Web Host
Bill Hartzer writes: Chase Bank is mining internet domain name whois data in the pursuit of credit card customers. When they encounter whois privacy on a domain name, they are disregarding it and alternatively sending the credit card offers to the domain owners’ web hosting companies. If Chase Bank has a credit card offer for you,…
Who’s putting ads in your bank statement?
Linda Stern of ThomsonReuters reports: What if you went to your online bank statement and saw a message like this: “Hello, shoe lover! Here’s 15 percent off the hottest spring styles!” Would it make you happy to get the discount, or uncomfortable because somebody at your bank knew you had a weakness for strappy sandals?…
Privacy blunders: good for innovation?
Rhonda Callow responds to a statement made by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media last year in a blog post he wrote entitled My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy. At the time, O’Reilly wrote, in part: “But let’s not make privacy a third rail issue, pillorying any company that makes a mistake on the privacy…