Now that the official Amazon Mobile iPhone app is here, it's easier than ever to check prices from anywhere, even while shopping in retail stores. And the company's clever new "Amazon Remembers" service will use humans to identify product pics snapped with the iPhone, even if they include shoes worn by the person sitting next to you on the subway.

Both are Good Things, but can too much of a Good Thing turn a little sour on the tongue?

Don't even try to hide it

I confess there have been occasions when I went to a retail store, learned about and handled products, then went home and ordered them less expensively over the Internet. After getting a laptop and an EVDO card, the practice went at time a bit further; I would retreat to the parking lot, check online deals, and make a buying decision there in the front seat of the car. But actually scanning the Internet for lower prices while standing in the store?

The practice might feel a bit like being caught reading a dirty novel in the back of the library stacks ("Can I help you with anything?" "Uh, no, just looking, thanks! Please go away!") but Amazon wants to make it mainstream. In the official App Store description of its new iPhone app, the company suggests it can be used for "comparing prices on Amazon and 9,000 other merchants to those in the retail store you are visiting."

It's certainly a consumer-friendly idea, though one wonders if it will cause that throbbing vein on the necks of Best Buy and Borders execs to throb a bit more quickly. For Amazon to explicitly suggest that shoppers take advantage of bricks-and-mortar stores—an expensive investment that Amazon has purposely not made—and then use the benefit derived from those stores to order the product cheaply online, well, that's a pretty straightforward declaration of war.

Retailers certainly can't be pleased with idea of all those 1-click iPhone orders going to Amazon even as customers stand in their stores, fondling their merchandise. Not antagonizing your customers is the first rule of business, but it's not real hard to imagine some stores approaching heads-down iPhone users with a crisp, "May I help you, ma'am?"

Amazon Remembers, so snap away!

Once, while rumbling through the darkened tunnels of the Prague Metro, the train pulled up to a station stop, the doors opened, and a man with a monkey on his shoulder stepped inside. It doesn't look so odd when written down in print like that, so let me say it again: he had a live monkey. On his shoulder. On the Prague Metro.

I did what anyone would do—waited until he turned away (the monkey continued to level its creepy simian gaze at me) and snapped a surreptitious photo. I mean, the dude had a monkey! On his shoulder! On the Metro!

I bring this up only to point out that snapping pictures without permission of people at close range in public places is generally something of a taboo; at the least, it can be shockingly impolite. (Though when you have a monkey! on your shoulder! on the Metro! I'd say you're fair game.) Which is why Amazon's new "Amazon Remembers" feature sounds potentially unsettling.



So many chances for shopping

Amazon Remembers uses the iPhone camera to snap images, which are uploaded to the cloud and farmed out to humans for identification with Amazon products. Cool enough when the product is a book cover, of course, but what if it's an article of clothing currently worn by someone sitting next to you on the subway? We are treading in the deep waters of etiquette here.

Amazon has no problem with the practice, though. In its official App Store description, the company suggests that people start snapping away in public. "Seeing if Amazon Remembers can find a pair of shoes for sale like the one the person sitting next to you is wearing," it offers. Perhaps I'm betraying my own sense of personal space here, but I would not feel pleased to see people holding out their iPhones to photograph the label on my jeans, the brand of my shoes, or the cut of my scarf when I'm riding the El from Oak Park to the Loop.

Pirates of the Amazon



Oddly enough, this week also saw the release of some software that does the same thing to Amazon that Amazon encourages iPhone users to do to other retailers. "Pirates of the Amazon" is a Firefox extension that compares Amazon products with items available on The Pirate Bay; when it finds a match, the add-on creates a "download 4 free" button directly on the Amazon product page. Clicking it retrieves the file using BitTorrent.

It's not the same thing, of course, being utterly illegal, immoral, and generally piratical (which is sort of the point). It's also not currently available, with the site displaying a "The Ship was hit. We're offline" message at the moment.

Personally, if I had to draw behavioral lines around various practices, I wouldn't be a "Pirate of the Amazon," but I would use the Amazon iPhone app to price check stores—and I'd return to the parking lot to do it. Why? For the same reason I wouldn't tell my dinner hosts that their instant mashed potatoes reminded me of caulk in a bowl, though I might make the observation to my wife in the car on the way home.

As for Amazon Remembers, snapping standalone objects is fine and useful, but taking pics of someone's shoes, laptop case, watch, hat, or gloves in public feels a bit too much like being a paparazzi. If someone sitting beside me in a coffee shop started snapping iPhone pictures of my jeans, I can't imagine liking it a whole lot, but neither can I really imagine people walking up to strangers all over the country and asking, "Hey, do you mind if I take this picture of your pants with my phone?" and getting a positive result.

There are no black and white lines here, though, just shades of grey; how would you handle these issues?