Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
Maybe a better question is is he a terrorist, spy, tin-foil hat wearer, or just afraid his mommy will discover he is reading porn?  Seems like a bit of extreme paranoia over anyone knowing what he reads.... |
That is an unfair and ad hominem put-down. Assiduously protecting one's privacy on the internet is a legitimate endeavor, not one to be mocked because you don't happen to share it.
Some perfectly ordinary, law abiding and non-paranoid people do not want to be data mined. Some people are concerned about the way many of the largest companies have mishandled private data that their customers have entrusted to them.
Insurance companies, bankers, lawyers, potential or current employers, and government agencies are known to scoop up *everything* they can find on a person's online activities and to use that information sometimes to the detriment of the objects of the probe.
For all we know Amazon has a cooperative agreement with intelligence agencies to report all of its customers' activity just as AT&T had until that massive violation of privacy was exposed by journalists. In the recent past, other companies have been discovered to have egregiously shared the private data of their customers by design or through inadvertence.