North Carolina defends request for Amazon.com customer records

The North Carolina Secretary of Revenue said Wednesday that it never demanded personal information such as book titles from Amazon.com, which filed a federal lawsuit against the state this week seeking to keep that information confidential. But CNET has obtained correspondence from the Department of Revenue that calls North Carolina's claim into question.

In a letter to Amazon dated December 1, 2009, Romey McCoy, the Department of Revenue's audit manager, asked for "all information" relating to nearly 50 million purchases that customers in that state had made between 2003 and 2010. McCoy's letter did not exempt the titles of books or Blu-Ray movies, and did not address the privacy implications of the request. Amazon subsequently turned over limited, anonymous information: the amount of the purchase, the seller, and the postal code it was sent to. McCoy replied in a second letter on March 19, 2010 saying Amazon had until this Monday to divulge the full records of each transaction or North Carolina "will" take legal action. To punctuate his threat of litigation, McCoy's letter copied two assistant attorneys general from the North Carolina Department of Justice.