Is Amazon.com guessing customers’ religions based upon the gift wrap paper they select?

In addition to sending customers targeted product information based upon their previous purchases and browsed items, the Seattle online retailer has recently been granted a new patent that could determine a shopper’s religion, based upon the style of gift wrap chosen.

The patent was detailed by Slashdot.

According to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Amazon says the patent is aimed at “mining of user event data to identify users with common interests.” The patent also seems to describe social media use for the technology, which Amazon describes as a “computer-implemented method of matching users to other users.

Amazon says it can glean detailed information about people based on their online patterns and information, including a “user’s residence location, as determined or inferred based on the shipping or credit card address supplied by the user for purposes of conducting online transactions;” and a person’s likely place of employment, as well as blogs or newsletter subscriptions.

The matching service may additionally or alternatively take into consideration other types of information about each user, including, by way of illustration and not of limitation, any one or more of the following: (1) gift purchases made by other users for this particular user; (2) the gift wrap used by such other users when purchasing gifts for this user, such as when the gift wrap evidences the user’s religion (in the case of Christmas or Hanukkah gift wrap, for example); (3) the time of day at which the user typically engages in online activity; (4) the location (e.g., city) or locations from which the user accesses the matching service 62 or otherwise engages in online activity, as may be determined reasonably accurately based on IP addresses associated with the user computing devices.