Slashdot Mirror
Economic Predictions Using Web Usage Data
Makarand writes "The Chicago Tribune has an article on the claims of ComScore Networks Inc., that it can predict major economic
trends by tracking the online activity of 1.5 Million people.
The company gains access to people's Internet travelogues by giving
them free security software and programs that speed up their connections. Economists say that
the company's models need to be tested over several years
before they can be considered accurate."
Firm tracks Web activity to predict economy
By Rob Kaiser
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 30, 2002
Investors are always scavenging for data that could indicate the market's direction. Changes in everything from cardboard box orders to hemline lengths have led to stock market bets.
Now upstart ComScore Networks Inc. is claiming it can predict major economic trends by tracking the online activity of 1.5 million people.
While using Internet data to gauge the entire economy remains unproven--and economists are skeptical--the possibility highlights the Internet's unique ability to capture how people spend their time and money.
"It's a heck of a lot easier to watch somebody's online behavior than to follow everyone around in their daily lives," said Brian Wesbury, chief economist with Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson Inc. in Chicago. "So the more things we do online, the easier it is to track our behavior."
ComScore gains access to people's Internet travels by giving them free security software and programs that speed up their Internet connections. With its capacity to download 18 billion Web page views annually, ComScore expects this year to capture 800 million Internet searches and 5 million online transactions.
The question facing the 3-year-old company is how to use all this data.
So far, ComScore has gone in several directions, publishing rankings of the most-visited Web sites, tracking the success of online marketing campaigns and predicting the results of e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com prior to the companies' earnings reports.
Now the company is launching its boldest initiative, betting it can extrapolate what is happening online to the offline world. ComScore says it can determine spending, employment, automobile sales and other economic measures by comparing prior government data to levels of Internet spending and traffic on certain sites during the same period.
"I've been in the research business for a long time, but this is blowing my mind," said Gian Fulgoni, ComScore's chairman. Fulgoni, formerly the chief executive of market research firm Information Resources Inc., is based in ComScore's Chicago office. The company is officially based in Reston, Va., where its president is located.
To estimate employment levels, ComScore looks at visits among the people it tracks to more than 1,000 sites with job listings. It estimates how many of those visitors are unemployed by looking at whether the searches are being conducted at home during normal work hours and how often they visit the sites.
Research tool
"Consumers use the Internet today more than any other medium to research important decisions," Fulgoni said.
ComScore tries to predict the government's overall retail spending figure by looking at online buying activity.
"It mirrors it enough that you can predict if spending is going to be strong or weak in a month," Fulgoni said. "I'm not saying it's a perfect correlation."
As a second gauge of spending, ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online.
ComScore charges $50,000 for an annual subscription to the economic data. So far, Fulgoni says, a few customers have signed on to receive the information.
The company is also selling its data to an upstart hedge fund for a reduced price in return for a percentage of the fund's gains.
David Nuelle, a founder of the Arcanum Fund, said he will use ComScore's data to make investment decisions in e-commerce companies and offline firms, such as Southwest Airlines, where customers often place orders via the Internet.
"You can get a strong sense of the revenues" of companies that do business on the Internet, Nuelle said. "It'll be the strongest data point we will look at."
ComScore, which has 200 employees, has enjoyed some success at predicting the results of e-commerce companies.
Last month, the company estimated that Amazon.com would report third-quarter sales of between $839 million and $851 million, exceeding analysts' consensus estimates of $807 million. Two weeks later Amazon.com announced third-quarter revenue of $851.3 million.
Still, predicting the results of individual e-commerce companies is a far cry from being able to provide a new window to the direction of the entire economy.
"To make money off this thing you have to be better than the Blue Chip consensus," said Anil Kashyap, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "There's a long way between saying we can predict and making money."
Testing needed
Kashyap and other economists said the company's models need to be tested over several years before they can be considered accurate. Also, the company will have to learn how to account for a general increase in Internet use and sales as well as seasonal factors, they said.
A more proven area of ComScore's business is showing companies whether their online advertising is sparking offline sales. ComScore gathers grocery store scanning data for 60,000 of the people it is tracking to watch their buying habits.
Nestle Purina Pet Care has used this service to determine if its Web site and online ads are prompting additional sales.
"We don't have that closeness of data with any other medium," said Michael Moore, director of Purina Interactive in St. Louis.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
"The company gains access to people's Internet travelogues by giving them free security software and programs that speed up their connections."
I always thought that anyone who provides programs to "Speed up your internet connection" were crooked and could not be trusted. Spyware at its finest. As far as this company providing "security software"...I won't even go there.
-Krnl
http://krnlpanic.com
Tracking the behaviour of 1.5 million people. And all these people are aware they are being tracked? And they did agree?
I can't believe it...
PS. Watch out! You computer has an IP address...
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
P.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
This would make the world a better place, even if it could not be used to forcast the next great depresion.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
but that's just my 2 cents.
Given that the equipment you need to access the web is still fairly pricy, and also that the majority of people accessing it are still relatively young, I'd question the ability of this model to extrapolate to the wider world.
Cheers,
Ian
I don't think the group theý're tracking will be very representative. Allthough there is a large group of people is using the Internet there's no way global trends can be predicted by their behaviour. There is a world out there that's hardly connected (some call it Africa) that has some influence on our world's economy but is left out completely.
Maybe the researchers should see the world is bigger than the US
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
ComScore announces their predictions for this year based on web activity. You should take all of your money out of large cap stocks and invest heavily into p0rn!
ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online
Is it just me - or does that sound slightly worrying?
They claim to look at a cross section of society, but I'm willing to bet only the criminally insane would sign up knowing that they are perusing your credit card statements...
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
As a second gauge of spending, ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online.
That's right: If you have their spyware installed on your computer, they are going to be looking through your credit card statements.
Why isn't this illegal yet?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
In 5 years we will all be using Free Software, and the American Government for the first time ever elects a Communist president.
As a second gauge of spending, ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online.
It sends details from credit card statements!!? I wonder how many of the users of this thing are aware that it does this...
This sounds like spyware to me. 'Free security software and software to speed up their internet connection' sounds a bit vague about what this actual does apart from send confidential information to this company.
Analysts of various kinds already have access to our shopping and TV viewing habits. The web is used by a much smaller percentage of people. If they can't use the data they already have to make economic predictions then adding a bunch of porn sites isn't going to tip the balance.
people's viewing of porn gauge the economical climate?
I guess you could predicate higher economical activity followed by a brief period of laxed activity, cycling every 20 minutes between 10pm and 1 am...
So how is this useful again?
Tournament Management Online &
My economy prediction is that comscore will soon file a chapter 11.
In other news, Jenna Jameson gets a large raise... ;)
This sounds a lot like Pyschohistory from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels. Predicting the future using models of how a large number of people behave. Do we give Isacc some credit?
Smeghead every day of the week.
Notwithstanding the privacy issues involved, which have been discussed by other people -
:)
I'd have thought that if you could get a representative group of people of sufficient size, and allow for intrinsic skew in the data, then watching what they do online - what their ecommerce browse to conversion rates are, whether they're shopping at all, whether they're looking at holidays, cars, that kind of thing - could well provide a very good short-term predictor of where the economy is going next.
You could find out, for instance, that people were planning to buy new cars or go on a long-haul holiday weeks or months before that was converted to Real Money in the retailers' pockets, and upwards of three months before the quarterly reports from the companies themselves start to reflect the changes in the economic climate.
Sounds to me like this could be a really interesting toy to use as an adjunct to playing the markets
I bet that according to thier data, 100% of all internet users use Windows.
They're sampling the dumbest 10% of internet users, they're not going to get anything useful.
I really think this is only looking at a small, unscientific sample of the population, and is therefore highly prone to skewing.
It has also been my observation that most spending on-line is from discretionary funds, so this tends to skew the results as well.
Finally, it does take into account the type of information being accepted by their target audience. Those who get their information primarily from internet sources, deal with a different set of information than those who rely primarily on TV/newspapers, and will therefore make different buying decisions.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Does anyone know what Amex, Discover, Visa, MasterCard, etc. are doing currently with the data they accumulate? I am not suggesting anything nefarious, rather I think these institutions, by having much larger (and probably more representative) sample sizes, would be able to accomplish much more than this smaller company would.
Directly from the article "As a second gauge of spending, ComScore also looks for trends in the credit card statements that about 30,000 of its panelists view online." and "ComScore gains access to people's Internet travels by giving them free security software and programs that speed up their Internet connections. With its capacity to download 18 billion Web page views annually, ComScore expects this year to capture 800 million Internet searches and 5 million online transactions." now after a quick serch of of the site ComScore Networks Inc i couldn't find any reference to this free security software... So, is it just be or does it sound pretty fishy that this site looks at all your web queries, your online credit card statements, what you buy and dont, but isn't recognized by the company?....
Dare i scream invasion of privacy?
...communist...
I think you mean "Socialist". HTH!
I just got back from a week off and found 472 pieces of junk in my mailbox and web advertising as relentless as ever. Someone is paying, but perhaps fewer people, considering the attitudes of some friends, they can live without it all. I wonder which demographics then are more highly represented?
"Look ma, I got 18 more offers to make money at home and a penile enlargement and russian women are dying to meet me! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The key is to categorize the type of porn that is being viewed.
Teen porn would indicate a desire to return back to school for more education. This can be used to indicate a slowing in the job market or radical changes in job skills being required.
Lesbian porn indicates a desire for more social time, expanding ones horizons, and generally a good economy, since everyone is getting more then enough of the good stuff.
Hardcore porn would indicate a slowing economy, since you are just pounding away at the task at hand.
Gay porn would indicate a resession, since that is most likely when you are taking it in the ass at work, so why not see how the professionals do it.
Hope this helps with future economical models based off of the viewing habbits of porn.
Tournament Management Online &
I have three points ,
Firstly, How can online activity ever be an active indicator of economic trends? Not everything done online is replicated at large in market in the real world. For example - I read news online, but dont buy any newspaper. I have browsed through catalogs of material online in amazon but havent bought much from them compared to what I would spend on totally different items in retail stores. The same applies for travel too.
Secondly, even if they do manage to get the software that tracks information on to peoples machine. How is this very different from online votes which almost always go with a disclaimer saying "The results represent only those who have been online on the site and is not scientifically valid" ?
They seem to have tons of predictions already . Is it just me or does someone else see their common trend of predicting that online business is THE IN thing.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
I recently learned about Zipf's Law, which uses a very simple formula to predict quantities of all sorts of things.
It's truly amazing. For example, it accurately predicts the populations of the 10 most populous cities, the number of appearances of the 10 most oft-used words on the entire Web, etc.
From a quick Google query: "Zipf's law, named after the Harvard linguistic professor George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), is the observation that frequency of occurrence of some event ( P ), as a function of the rank ( i) when the rank is determined by the above frequency of occurrence, is a power-law function Pi ~ 1/ia with the exponent a close to unity."
Here is some more information: http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Hari Seldon of foundation fame (thanks to isaac assimov) was an expert at psychohistory , a science which could predict the future by studying the behavior of large mass of people. The larger the mass, the more accurate the prediction. And that was science fiction...... Well, atleast in this case it is limited to economic forcasting. But then, what kind of data tracking do they do ? I mean, for example, how will the nature of slashdot postings help decide what that user is going to buy/sell/mortgage ? and security software that reports your browsing ? it's like saying microsoft is preaching GPL...
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
"Economists say that the company's models need to be tested over several years before they can be considered accurate."
Funny, they're making Economics out to be a bona fide science.
I guess ComScore makes use of some similar philosophy... :)
Reading their privacy statement it should be noted that they are an incredible security risk and this company should be treated with the contempt that they deserve, the information they take is everything from emaills to SSL traffic and should put a chill through anyone.
What information is collected?
During the initial registration process, we request certain information, such as name, address, e-mail address, and education, about you and other persons who live with you or have the same mailing address as you (collectively, we call this your "Household"). After you register, our Network then collects additional information about your Household's Internet behavior and that of any other computers used by members of your Household that you have configured to use the e-Trends service. This information is then combined with other e-Trends member data and other information to create an aggregate view of Internet e-commerce. e-Trends monitors your surfing, essentially logging information about the web pages that you visit and the actions that you take, such as the purchases and transactions you make. e-Trends can only monitor the Internet behavior and activity of your Household's registered and configured computers. As a member, you therefore control which computers the e-Trends service is available on. e-Trends monitors both the normal web browsing you perform, and also the activity you may have through secure sessions, such as when filling a shopping basket or filling out an application form. e-Trend's proprietary and patent pending technology allows us to see the details of secure pages while protecting such content from parties other than the site to which you are connected. We monitor these connections so we can accurately and anonymously model not only the browsing habits of Internet users, but also their shopping, registration, and other interactions as well. Although we generally monitor your Internet behavior as part of this service, e-Trends does not examine, use nor keep any instant messages or examine or use the contents of any of your e-mail messages, except to perform specific functions necessary to provide you the e-Trends service (such as scanning your e-mails to effectively search for viruses), and as a quality assurance check against and method for verifying information on the surfing and buying behavior of e-Trends members.
Quite simply they read all your internet traffic
These companies should be illegal and the quicker someone sues them to oblivion the better,
but i see that handily Comscore have this e-trends as a subsidiary company just in case someone does that it wont affect the parent company.
buyer beware
And if there is any particular political bias on Slashdot, it's libertarian.
This is nothing new. Companies were already giving us 'free' programs that 'speed up our connections' and 'improve our security' years ago!They're called Trojans.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
The company gains access to people's Internet travelogues by giving them free security software...
:)
This makes me laugh so much. They give you 'free security software' to prevent your computer and privacy from being compromised in exchange for compromising your privacy.... The paradox is incredible
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
What bothers me here is that the programs that are being used to bring spyware to the common user are programs that do things for which either there already exists an spyware-free solution, or is a program us /.ers could write in minutes.
Speeding up an Internet connection is more-or-less a myth in the first place, you can't make software to cause a modem to go any faster than it goes physically. The only thing that really can be done is to make sure there's nothing stupid in the Windows registry slowing down the connection... and guess what, in older versions of Windows there is! Microsoft initially set the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) to something that made sense on a LAN connection, but caused an annoying number of retransmitted frames on a modem connection. Lower that number to something sane, and web pages will appear to the user to be faster. However, that didn't really speed up the modem, it's now just not wasting as many cycles on bad data. Changing the MTU number is a registry hack, the program needs to only be run once... no need for it to be there on every boot.
Another such program syncs your computer's clock with to official U.S. Government time. That's a cool and useful function, but it's really just using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) standard to contact government servers. Anybody who bothers to read the docs can write their own program to do that. Microsoft has even built NTP into Windows XP, although once-a-week updates isn't exactly enough for most users who care about their clock accuracy.
Another program hitches its ride offering the local thermometer reading from your local TV station's WeatherNet system in an icon in your system tray. Cool feature... but wait a second here. What if you don't live near a WeatherNet site? Oh, that's simple, it taps into the National Weather Service data to get you a report. But NWS's data is public, paid for by your tax dollars. The info is available on both FTP and HTTP servers that are absolutely free to access.
Open source projects could knock these "Download me!" programs out of existance. Why don't we?
Yeah and that's Mrs. President to you pal!
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
This is actually old news: http://news.com.com/2010-1074-281580.html?legacy=c net
According to this article:
ComScore works differently but achieves the same result. The company runs a script that redirects all of the data that goes into your browser through its own computers, much like an ISP, and caches data so it loads quicker.
How invasive is this? ComScore Chairman Fulgoni said that his company has examined the online banking records of some of its customers in order to verify household income information provided during the sign-up process.
After reading the article and deciding to ignore the already made point that this is an invasion of privacy:
This kind of data if collected well could very well help in profiling online trends and giving subscribers to this data a "leg-up" on their competitors. That's True. BUT, I doubt that this data can be used for predicting meat-world trends. The only people you are dealing with are the ones who are both willing to buy online and are willing to allow spyware on their boxen. I'd guess that the fact that you're talking about a select group of unsophisticated users, who are yet sophisticated enough to research and/or purchase online, would mean that the data is self-censoring.
It's sort of like surveying people who hate telemarketers over the phone. You'll only talk to a very few people and likely have a useless data set. It would be like a survey on invasion of privacy issues only from people willing to report to the surveyor thier SSN.
Catch my drift?
The resultant data would influence an investor house to make an unwise decision and bet on the wrong dog in the grand dog-race called the Stock market. The data provider can dope up the right dogs to make itself some money. That's what I think of whenever I read about these "trend" predicting companies. That's just me though.
[signature]
IT's fairly easy to tell what folks are shopping/looking for, across a selection of key word urls. there is no need for FraUDuleNT stock markup "economissed" to tale US much of anything.
the really important part, is in transforming those folks, into sellers/consumers of genuine quality products/services, without hooking them into any payper liesense hostage ransom scams.
anyhow, without reading the 'economyst's' predictions, here are the top 5 "movers" as we see them.
1. entertainment, (primarily music, with other media, in close pursuit). the hunt for associated media gadgetry is lumped here.
2. business/education: information/financial/products/services.
3. fashion.
4. health.
5. travel/relocation/employment.
the "order" is somewhat flexible, but the key words "pattern" is rock solid across almost 200 sites that we monitor.
possible recognition of our sleekness under fire (see also: sh!tstorm of deceptive billonlyUS ?pr? FUDgePacking), would include being listed as one of the "Top 10 Companies of 2002"(tm), on fuddle's search thingy. even more good gnus....
what used to cost billyuns in markup "research" can now be done for about 10 minutes of one's time. again, the real job becomes: now that we know what you want, how do we come to terms....,?
They will try to claim Psychology is a science too!
Therapist THE Rapist...say that 3 times fast...
1) Make something people want to download.
2) Add some hidden spyware in the product.
3) Sell tracking information to the big corporations and make $$$.
How useful would this data be, considering that they will only have dumbass, clueless lusers using their spyware? Maybe most Americans do fit that criterion though...
Consider marketing research firms that get paid boatloads of money to put people into demographic categories. Now, consider Microsoft's Passport initiative that tracks you online, where you surf, what you buy, where you live, work, and travel, and can infer all kinds of personal info like your domestic status. You are no longer part of a demographic group, you are a demographic; one of 200 million. How much would advertisers be willing to pay Microsoft for access to that database?
"How perfectly Goddam delightful it all is, to be sure." - Robert Crumb
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
--I live in a rual area. I'd guesstimate that within a one mile radius of where I live the medium age is at least 50 (or close to that), ie, not a whole lotta kids around here,mostly neo geezers or geezers. Almost every household around here has an online computer now. Most of these folks are retired or close to it, and buy stuff online. Reason I know this is because I am the local nerd and get called on by the neighbors to help fix or explain this or that. They usually have much older machines-well I do too, but still, online is online, it doesn't require the very latest bleeding edge that younger folks get, primarily for gaming purposes it appears. Hmm, I'm thinking of this one millionaire contractor I do occassional work for, he's only running an old 300 mghz (or so) machine that his son gave him. He could go buy a brand new whatever, and has no need so he doesn't. Just like his pickup he drives around, he could afford a brand new one and just isn't buying one, he has no need at this point. Yet he owns hundreds of acres has a huge house, plays with his horses, goes on trips and vacations, etc. In other words generalizations can be deceiving.
ya, I try to do this anyway, the "help fix this or that" part..... too funny really.....
As to this company's predictions, I bet they can get close enough using available data mining techniques. We don't really have any indication how extensive their collation efforts are, but given what we know about virtually every industry selling/sharing it's data, combined with web surfing mappage, they probably can get a reasonable approximation, and every day they add to it it gets 'better". Even most states sell demographic info, credit histories, zipcodes are tied to al of this as in past dead trees bulk mailings, what you buy all the way from grocery store shopping cards to banking records are all avaialable now. Combine this with surfing habits, well, that's a lot of decent data to work from..
These are the same people who think those banner ads that show up on web sites drawn to LOOK like windows alert boxes (you know, with the titlebar and the "x" buttons) are REAL windows alerts.
"Oh, my computer told me it was slow and I had to click there to fix it, so I did!" I don't know how many computers I have to clean up as a result of stupid people like that.
Cab drivers know. Just ask 'em "how's business?"
Without installing Spyware on your machine. Imagine that! You can be a nice, legitimate business which doesn't violate people's privacy in order to get money!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I've recently started my own, informal, survey based on amazon.com's top sales and "movers and shakers" lists. Of course the data is skewed towards certain groups of people, bu among those groups there should be some interesting trends, like how the purchases are affected by the entertainment industry, holidays, new market releases, major price drops, etc. Maybe /. will let me post my results in a few months.
I used to manage the logs for a company that collected web usage on 150k users.
You can normalize for your sample by comparing your group against a known baseline. What is interesting to me is that the "normalized" groups like what Neilsen uses are tiny (3000 users) and thus have their own flaws (undercounting Goatse visits since their population of users is so tiny they're missing out on all sorts of behavior).
Here are some things you could do.
1) track e-trade, schwab, and yahoo finance to see what stocks people are checking - a good way to anticipate market changes/volatility
2) monitor site traffic for e-commerce sites to gauge how much business they are doing.
3) accurately measure how many click thoughs banner sites get (almost none)
etc.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
This can only Economic predictions are based on a sample on people who "download free software onto their computer".
Not exactly a random distribution of the populous, is it?
They are already restricting the data this software collects, as its source of data pertains to a specific sample base:
1, (PC) Computer owners
2, Home Users
3, The type of fool that downloads something willy nilly on their computer.
Given this conditions, the survey base could not really exceed 50% of the range of population. Therefore can really only be 50% accurate.
(yes I pulled the 50% out my head, based on my survey of my coworkers).
>Please stop badmouthing Free Software as if it
>had anything to do with "Communism".
That became a lost cause when Stallman first used the term "Manifesto" to frame his agenda.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
...is that there isn't enough historical data on past internet usage to prove its all baloney yet.
By the time there is, they ought to be able to pump out quite a few subscriptions, books, and speaking tours.
On the bright side, at least now we know where the "Y2K" baloney purveors went. Even better, they are leaving us coders alone this time.
So let me get this straight... global economic trends will be predicted by tracking browsing habits of people who use download 'accelerators'? I sincerely hope nothing important will be decided on these results.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Gee, most of my web browsing of late involves monster.com, hotjobs.com. careerbuilder.com, dice.com, and usajobs.opm.gov - I think that's a sign the economy sucks.
Attention: Ekrout is a known karma-whoring Slashdot troll
For the uninitated, erickrout is the kid who crapflooded Kuro5hin for months on end with at least a half-dozen accounts. For a long time, he dominated the Hidden Comments page with an interminable list of racist, sexist, homophobic, and completely self-absorbed comments.
Eric Krout lives behind the protective mask of EricKrout.com but in reality is a professional slashdot troll only posting for unknown evil. Eric has been spotted on trolltalk attempting to be added to "troll back", a daily newsletter that rates how well various trolls have posted and karma-whored on slashdot.
Whatever EricKrout might tell you in his posting is not true. He merely puts on a different facade for every article attempting to rack up mod points for no other reason than the fact that he is a self-absorbed punk kid.
In conclusion, if you are moderating or replying to this comment, I caution you, it is 100% untrue.
--the eric krout troll
"revealing the unrevealed since 2002"
Personally I think Stallman is wrong on just about everything he says, and is a dyed in the wool socialist, but I still don't see what term he could have used in preference to Manifesto. And I don't generally associate it with Marx, possibly because I've never read the Comm. Manifesto.
in other news, brash young entrepeneurs
talk shit, and blow smoke up people's asses
while stodgy old men try to discredit their
competitors by pointing out their poor
business models.
In common American usage, "communism" stands for what they had in the USSR, and that was bad.
1). Figures are going to be really skewered by the fact that people who will download and use a "download faster !" utility are a subset of the population whos behavior differs from the rest of the population. :-)
2). Unless these people are actually collecting details about financial transactions done over the web (that cannot be legal right ?), the figures they get will be page hits and sites visited which does not really correlate to actual sales figures.
3). How good are their statistical methodologies, you can find fairly strong corrilations between any two sets of data by chosing the right stat functions.
4). Don't we have enough trend indicators already that are far more accurate than spyware collected date ?
5). Of course if they actually collected credit card numbers and looked up transactions then they would have better results. Anybody want to tell them that ?
The only difference between what this company is doing and what so-called anonymous proxy servers are doing is that ComScore Networks is being upfront about saving the pages you visit and analysing your browsing history.
Stringing together multiple anon servers might give you a bit better feeling of privacy. However, you still have to trust the anon server you initially send the request to. Is it secure if the anon server promises not to keep logs? I'd be very interested to know if there are any open source projects that are working on web browsing via chains of anon proxies with concentric encrypted wrappers al la MixMaster.
Maybe if all the slashdot user would download thier spyware and only enable it for 10 minutes a day we can browse a few agreed upon sites for about 10 minutes a day we could make thier data reflect our views.
Let them think that we are all buying beanie babies or some other stupid thing.
Will be Silicon based, but this time it will come with tassles and edible undies
It looks like someone has started a project to analyze ComScore's spyware. It looks like one goal is to forge user data so that the spyware servers can be flooded with false data. Check out their Wiki at:C omSpyware
http://www.seedwiki.com/page.cfm?wikiid=1131&doc=
because popups suck
--meh--
Why not analyse router logs (or proxy logs from a provider) ?
More data from more users, and they don't have to ask anybody.
Also they would not own the data - they would just pass and analyse it.
It's still quite popular to include an with this link as target, so to a luser it looks like if a listing of his folders and files was right there on the web page that came from the server. I see something like that every once in a while when I pay a visit to Astalavista or something like that.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not is ignorant. Teach him.
He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep. Wake him.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...