Probably tens of millions of dollars or more. There is a lot of pressure on Amazon to perform and controversy over the purchase circles. The Seattle-based company has aggregated purchases coming from within certain companies, posting bestseller lists coming from those buyers. At PC Expo last June, Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos demonstrated how the company could use that information to recommend relevant purchases to customers shopping for themselves or people buying for them. One worry among privacy advocates is that, through its affiliate program, Amazon might know a lot more than customers think and that data goes well beyond their taste in literature.
Many consumers are ambivalent about privacy.
They say they do not want companies to intrude on their private lives, but very few perform proactive tasks such as disabling their browser cookies which would protect their data but also prevent them from doing some tasks on the Web.