[mysterywhiteboy]

The lack of transparency from Amazon here is worrying.

Because it appears to be Amazon UK dealing with the account holder I'd be interested to know if she would get anywhere by submitting a Subject Information Request [1].

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 an individual can submit a request for personal information held by an organization and they must comply within 40 days.

Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.

[1] http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/personal_information/ho...

[rmc]

Yes I was also thinking of the Data Protection Acts here aswell.

Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.

Well if they don't provide it, they are breaking the law, so you can complain about them again that way.

[mysterywhiteboy]

Unfortunately there are a number of circumstances where they are within their rights to withhold information. One of these situations is where the information relates to another individual.

If information is withheld she my be able to infer that the offending account to which she is linked is held by someone else - though the identity of the account holder would understandably not be given.

[mercurial]

This logic doesn't hold. Either Amazon is certain her account is operated by the same character guilty of whatever violations of policy behind the "linked account", in which case they're not disclosing any additional information, or they're not, in which case they know they might be punishing somebody innocent (the "Let God sort'em out" customer policy).

In any case, it sounds straight out of Kafka: you're punished, but you don't know what crime you are supposed to have committed.

[rossjudson]

And that's exactly what drives me bonkers about the current wave of "too big to care" web services, like GMail, Amazon or perhaps even Steam. Average consumer has absolutely no way of pushing back or even getting any information. It really feels like there needs to be some kind of law in place that requires some form of repayment if an account is closed. The problem there, I suppose, is potential for abuse -- buy a thousand books over a decade, then at the end "sacrifice" the account to get it closed, and try to get the money back.

[chris_wot]

There's irony: Amazon would try to stop information that would prove that her account is linked to another account by arguing that it would infringe a completely different person's privacy if it disclosed any information about the linked account that caused the original notification.

That's quite an interesting legal tactic they've got going there!