How would you feel if your favorite retailer turned over a list of all the books, movies, personal care items, or "adult" entertainment items you have purchased in the last seven years to your state government, with your name and address attached? That's exactly what North Carolina's Department of Revenue (DOR) wants from Amazon.com, and it wants that info for every North Carolina resident that has ordered from the Internet retailer since 2003. Amazon has pushed back, however, saying that doing so would violate its users' privacy and First Amendment rights.

In fact, Amazon has gone so far as to file a lawsuit against the North Carolina DOR in hopes of getting a judge to proactively rule the DOR's request unconstitutional. In its complaint, Amazon says the DOR does not need personally identifiable information in order to check up on Amazon's compliance with North Carolina's tax laws. The retailer says it has already handed over a list of what North Carolina customers have bought, what they paid, and the ZIP code where the items were shipped, which should be enough.

The North Carolina DOR doesn't think so, though. Clearly, government is trying to determine exactly which residents are skirting paying their sales taxes to the state with this strategy. (For those of you who didn't know, you actually are supposed to pay sales tax on those Amazon purchases, even though Amazon doesn't collect them from most of us. Needless to say, most customers conveniently "forget" come tax time.)

North Carolina has demanded the names and addresses of each state citizen along with every order detail, and has threatened Amazon with summary contempt for not already turning it over. "Amazon, without violating its customers’ privacy, fully cooperated by furnishing data requested by the DOR to conduct its tax analysis," reads the complaint. "The DOR’s actions threaten to chill the exercise of customers’ expressive choices and to cause Amazon customers not to purchase certain books, music, movies or other expressive material from Amazon that they might otherwise purchase if they did not fear disclosure of those choices to the government."

It certainly sounds as if the DOR's request reaches into privacy violation territory in the name of collecting taxes, and this isn't the first time it has targeted Amazon and its users in an attempt to bump state revenues. Like New York, Rhode Island, and Colorado, North Carolina recently passed a law saying that Amazon had to collect and fork over taxes for every one of its affiliates located in the state. This did not have the intended effect, though, as Amazon simply shut down its affiliate program in North Carolina in response.

Amazon believes the DOR's latest request violates its users' free speech rights as well as the Video Privacy Protection Act (the same argument used against Facebook when it was embroiled in its now-defunct Beacon debacle). Given these points, it's not unlikely that the judge will rule in Amazon's favor—assuming the North Carolina DOR doesn't decide to go with a less invasive investigation before then, that is.