Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

[mandy]

Article explains how a combination of Amazon Wishlists, Google Maps, and free software could be used by anyone to create detailed profiles of hundreds of thousands of Americans and monitor groups of people.

It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people.... an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example.

There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read...

Amazon wishlists...By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name...The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private

Thanks to Google Maps (and many similar services) a street address is all we need to get a satellite image of a person's home...

full article: http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks

[mandy]

The 'Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists' article gets a mention in an article on bloggers conspiracy theories regarding Amazon.com, MySpace.com, and Facebook.com

Perhaps I ventured a bit too far out of my echo chamber, but today I came across 3 different conspiracy theory articles about popular Web companies. One was about e-commerce giant Amazon.com and the other two related to leading Social Networking sites MySpace and Facebook. Here are the gory details…

...delved into the apparently murky world of MySpace and found a tale of intrigue. Well, some if it is a bit tabloid:

    "According to sources, while at Xdrive, Anderson rarely showered, spent an unusually high amount of time with DeWolfe, and took the bus everywhere - despite the rumor that he was making an additional $5,000 a month from running a pornography website...

Meanwhile Jacob Morse investigated Facebook.com and ends up invoking Orwell's 1984. He discovered a connection with the CIA:..

full article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=95