Your Package Has Arrived

Does dataveillance let companies know more about ourselves then we know about ourselves? Everyone knows that Google tracks their users searches and emails to create targeted advertisement, but Amazon is taking to the next level. Amazon applied for a patent in August of 2012 that was approved in December of 2013 for an idea called “Anticipatory Shipping”. The theory behind this is that through tracking of peoples Amazon.com searches, previous buys, and wishlists, Amazon will expect you to buy a specific item as a certain time. Their computers would run their algorithm, based off their calculated probability of buying the product, and would then ship your product. If the computers found a very high certainty of a future buy, Amazon.com would ship the product to your doorstep automatically. For those will a little lower certainty, Amazon would ship the product to your area’s local distribution center, so the wait time on the product in minimal.

Now, obviously, this will only work for people they have collected enough data on, so the buyer would have to be a frequent shopper at the site. It is also important to note that any pre-shipping has not yet commenced, and they are still working on the program but wanted to make sure their idea was protected first. If only I could patent my privacy. This would be dataveillance you could avoid by just avoid Amazon; but if it works for Amazon, and considering american patents only last twenty years, how soon before other companies use programs like this? Do you think that other corporations would be willing to buy rights to the patent from Amazon in return for the ability to do this? Twenty years is a long time for business owners to let competitors get ahead.

You can find out more about Amazon’s anticipatory shipping here:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/