Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Newsgroup Posters

theodp writes "Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." Those concerned that it's not a good idea for computers to track their belongings and whereabouts are advised that they may ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses."

Comments

What's wrong with this?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Did you guys really think that Microsoft's not profiling the Slashdot users, or the Linux kernel contributors or anyone they deem as a valuable target?

My god, you are so naive.

so what?

[acvh]

Don't tell me that you post on Usenet and expect those posts to be "private"! Give me a break. If ANYONE wants to read and study how people interact on this most public of forums, I fail to see how anyone can object.

Since the early days of netnews...

[sphealey]

Since the early days of netnews (now Usenet) is has been fairly clear that everything you post is being saved, and anything you post if fair game to be responded to, analyzed, and/or held against you at a later date. If this disturbs you, don't post in public forums.

And if Microsoft weren't doing this, wouldn't there be articles appearing with titles such as "Microsoft ignores valuable customer feedback available free on Internet"? I am no big fan of Redmond, but I think they are almost forced to do something like this to avoid being blindsided.

sPh

Slashdot Karma or Google PageRank

[peterdaly]

So it's like Karma on Slashdot, but on a more stealth level, like Google PageRank.

It's more like a Google PageRank implemented Newsgroup posters instead of Web Sites, and run by Microsoft instead of Google. Microsoft is just adding true statistics and tracking to the already existant "human credibility" of posters.

Newgroups posts are public.

I don't see this as a problem.

-Pete

Re:I read the article!

[TheGrayArea]

A big reason for this type of research in MS is to push the community support model. If MS can create a scenario where many questions get answered in a community model like newsgroups by unpaid volunteers/posters, it lowers the overall cost of product support for MS. Newsgroup support is becoming a big thing around Microsoft Product Support. There are actually engineers whose sole job is to monitor and respond to newsgroup postings.
It's all about support costs. Supporting newsgroups is very cheap and also very easy to farm out overseas to folks who really do nothing but paste in answers from scripts.

I don't

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I am Barlo Mung. Barlo Mung is me. It's my email address. It's my counter strike nic.
I'm not going to pretend to be anyone else.
Want to dredge up all the postings I've made anywhere on the internet? Go ahead. WTF do I care. If I didn't want people to read it and know it came from me, Barlo, I would not have posted it.

I'm glad that the majority of posters...

[bmajik]

are seeing this for what it is: "No big deal"

This is NOT big brother. This is about building valuable meta information on top of usenet. Why ? Because one of the things MS heard long ago is that people liked linux because they could go to a newsgroup and get help with it, often from the people that wrote the component in question ? What did MS do ? They responded - MS employees now monitor the microsoft.public news groups. We respond to posts, try and solve problems for people, answer questions, debug code, etc etc. I myself can be found occasionally posting in the Visual Basic newsgruops (where we have lots and lots of non-full-time or beginning programmers that really need just a little bit of help to get them going).

The people that _write_ the VB compiler are now monitoring VB newsgroups to try and help connect with real customers and to really understand how people use and dislike MS products.

Managing and making sense out of the whole mess that is usenet is a nightmare, and MS Research is doing some good work in this area. MS has some internal software that treats usenet posts as "issues" and determines if they've been resolved or not, if they need followup, etc etc. One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something.. like i said i don't know the details of that at all..

In any case, the point of this usenet data mining is to try and analyze the incredibly huge sea of usenet. We want to figure out what kinds of problems people have, what people are causing noise, what people are really helping other, etc etc. There is no nefarious invasion of privacy here, the only thing that is analyzable is what people explicitly post to a public forum...

Look at my userid - i was a slashdot reader long before i work where i currently do. Back then, the MS bashing and second guessing definitely took place, and i even participated. I'm still a slashdot reader but I do get awfully tired of the sheer volume and irrationality of negative-MS stuff that happens here.

When I started at MS, I found out awfully fast that many of my arguments against MS were speculative, but mostly it was me being factually wrong and talking out of my ass. I remember in my original interviews i was trying to lecture an NT developer about how putting GDI in kernel for NT4 was stupid because it would lead to crashes. How pompous of me! It was something I read on some stupid website or industry rag. Later I found out (from reading Inside W2k -- excellent book) that it was irrelevant because if the session manager sees that the GDI user-land process exits /crashes for some reason, it reboots the box anyhow, i.e. a problem with GDI reboots the box either way.

So after 8+ years of hating MS and talking out of my ass, followed by 3+ years of working at MS and realizing how much i was talking out of my ass, I'm doing two things:

1) talking out of my ass less
2) telling others that are clearly talking out of their ass that they are doing so, so that they can
2a) stop spreading misinformation
2b) have their eyes opened that nobody is impressed by their incorrect speculations and their emotional campaigns of disinformation

I know im not preaching to a sympathetic audience here, but honestly, the speculation, questions, etc people have about MS could be answered truthfully and honestly if some of you would bother to ask, or do some research. But unfortuneately i know all to well (because i used to do it) that its easier, and certainly more fun, to beleive everything you _want_ to beleive about MS that bolsters your own predetermined mindset. If, for example, you find yourself referring to an article that The Register wrote, please stop and ask yourself what the hell the regis