Amazon Sues North Carolina to Protect Customer Data

Amazon.com is suing to stop the NC Department of Revenue to block the state from collecting individual customer data:

Amazon contends in the suit that it routinely provides the Revenue Department with "voluminous information" about its sales to North Carolina as part of routine audits of the company's compliance with sales and use tax laws. The information includes the date and total price of each transaction, the city, county and ZIP code to which each item was shipped and Amazon's standard product code for each item, which allows officials to see the description of every product purchased.

In March, however, the Revenue Department threatened to hold a civil contempt hearing for Amazon if the company doesn't also turn over the names and addresses of anybody in North Carolina who has purchased goods off its website since August 2003, according to the suit. The company said that amounts to nearly 50 million purchases.

"If Amazon is forced to comply with this demand, the disclosure will invade the privacy and violate the First Amendment rights of Amazon and its customers on a massive scale," the suit states. "The (Revenue Department) does not need personally identifiable information
about Amazon's customers in order to audit Amazon's compliance with state tax laws. All it needs to know is what items Amazon sold to North Carolina customers and what they paid, and Amazon has already provided that information."

This would seem to be a significant invasion of privacy by the Department of Revenue, and I will be very interested to see if they can find a reasonable way to justify this intrusion.