According to an article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.

Gee, if only I knew someone who managed the customer database at Amazon to check up on this. Wait a second. I'm one of the folks who manages the customer database.

But... there aren't any fields in the database for this. Oh, wait -- this is a super-duper-ultra-black-top-secret project, right? After all, I did learn about it in the newspaper and not from my bosses. Let me check -- oh, I know! I'll bet that IS_TAX_EXEMPT column is actually storing sexual orientation!

Sheesh.