Posted yesterday and moved up to include the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s statement on the ruling.

A federal court in Western Washington ruled Monday that Amazon does not have to turn over government requests for detailed customer information, because it violates their constitutional rights.

The ruling was a victory for free-speech advocates at the ACLU, who along with Amazon had filed a lawsuit to stop the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) from collecting personal information about Amazon.com customers, which would have revealed what kind of books, films, and products they were buying.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha J. Pechman wrote, “Citizens are entitled to receive information and ideas through books, films, and other expressive materials anonymously… The fear of government tracking and censoring one’s reading, listening, and viewing choices chills the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Although Amazon provided the NCDOR with product codes that revealed the exact nature of the products—including alcoholism, divorce, LGBT issues—to comply with a tax audit, it withheld names and addresses so that customers could not be tracked to their individual addresses. But according to ACLU, the NCDOR refused to agree that it was not entitled to this information.

NCDOR said in a statement that “the case has been twisted into something it is not.” “The NCDOR wants to collect the sales tax that is due to the state and nothing more,” the statement said. “The judge yesterday acknowledged our need to collect these taxes and to gather the basic information necessary to do so. The department has not needed—and does not want—titles or similar details about products purchased by Amazon customers. The department has already purged that kind of information from its computer system that Amazon previously sent.”

The judge’s ruling says that the NCDOR can ask for the names and addresses of customers for tax purposes as long as they have destroyed the information on the product codes that Amazon gave them.

NCDOR is currently reviewing the judge’s decision and has not yet decided whether to appeal it.

16 replies on “Judge Rules Amazon Doesn’t Have to Hand Over Customers’ Names”

  1. Of course not.

    Corporations are People, after all.

    Even if they can’t be drafted, held in contempt in a jail cell, beaten up by cops, or go to jail for murdering people.

  3. Having a hard time wrapping my brain around the case, based on that original post. Has anyone figured whether the NCDOR was indeed asking for that information?

    “The department has stated in the past and reiterates that at no time has the Department of Revenue asked for book or CD titles because that information is not needed to assess tax owed to the State. We ask only for product type in order to determine the correct tax liability. Frankly, we are surprised the ACLU seeks to intervene since, in our conversation with them, we clearly reiterated that we were not seeking the information they find objectionable. We also find it ironic that, while they purport to protect their customers’ privacy rights, they have at the same time asked the Department to divulge confidential taxpayer information.”

  5. Why would NCDOR need anything beyond “book” “cd” “movie” etc for an audit? Actually I don’t know why they would need to know anything beyond that a tangible product was sold.

  6. Absolutely correct, @5, and that sorta answers @3’s question also.

    Yes, it’s all about tax revenue, and that’s a story unto itself, but what book or movie in particular I bought is nobody’s business but my own.

    And Will? Go fuck yourself.

  7. @6 my point is that not everything is taxed the same. Hence your answer, while seeming correct, avoids the actual reality of WHY NCDOR is asking for additional information.

    The question is, how can NCDOR get the information required to do their job WITHOUT the information they don’t need (e.g. that it’s Suzy Bright’s Book Of Big Gay Porn).

  10. Does anyone know if the NCDOR was trying to get this information through the USA Patriot act, or just through their own orneriness? Does the USA Patriot act apply to a state’s DOR? Would this ruling have any bearing on that act’s validity or constitutionality?

  11. And still, it seems unclear that they actually were trying to get this information. Or is that just their spin? Did the NCDOR actually request or say that it had the right to this information? Anyone? (Well, anyone except Will.)

  12. Maybe they wanted addresses to make sure they were all in North Carolina? But if they think the ACLU and Amazon misconstrued their argument, they did have lawyers representing them to make that case, and apparently they couldn’t do it very well. Also, who’s stupid enough to trust any organization to purge user info in this day and age?

  13. @12 exactly, OuterCow – for example, did you know that Fnarf likes Zombie Porn?

    Or at least that’s what he buys from Amazon.

  14. @11 usually they do a broad search. It’s easier to ask for everything than to ask for targeted information. And especially under the Patriot Act.

    what @12 said. There’s a lot of tax avoidance being mentioned in recent posts by people in the Seattle Times and PI about local taxes and how they never pay those online. When they read a lot of posts about how they use Amazon to do that, you’d expect the Treasury officials to take action in that regards.

  15. @ 11, hi, ACLU attorney Aden Fine said:
    “DOR did ask for detailed product information in their requests for ‘all information about all sales.’ They’ve always denied that. The Court rejected their argument and held that they did ask for that information.

    The ruling says that DOR is not prohibited from issuing a new request for user names once they have destroyed all of the detailed product information that they were previously permitted. That does not mean that such a request would be permissible. The Court was only ruling on the request before it, not any hypothetical later requests.”

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