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

Huh?

[BoomerSooner]

" 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."

Who isn't already doing this?

With the advent of spam most people I know abandonned their first email address years ago. I have one for each service I use (including slashdot).

Re:Huh?

[gregmac]

get your own domain and your own email server and go that way.

I set up a subdomain from one of my domains, that forwards all mail to one of my real addresses. Everytime I have to use my email, I use something at that subdomain, for example, slashdot@catch.domain.com. If I get spam to that address, 1) I can block the address without affecting anything else, and 2), I know who got my name on the list.

Particularily useful when you have to register to get access to download or use something. I'm careful about giving out those addresses anyways, and always "opt-out", so I get a surprisingly small amount of spam to them. I've yet to recieve spam for an address I gave to a company that said it wouldn't spam me.

Re:Huh?

[Malc]

What's the purpose of a sub domain?

I use MyInitials_UniqueIdentity@mydomain.com. For example, when I bought tickets from that over-priced poor-quality monopolistic Ticketmaster, I created an entry in my /etc/aliases file:
mf_ticketmaster_ca: mynormailmailbox

If I get spam, I comment the line out. I don't think your system allows anything extra... so I'm intrigued about your approach. Oh, and Ticketmaster did give away my email address. Their privacy statement is quite eye opening too.

I read the article!

[teamhasnoi]

It sounds like interesting and useful tech for USENET, but there is the question of MS doing it. I'd have far less reservations about it if Google was behind it.

The AURA just sounds like the CueCat Digital Convergence people who wanted to put a bar code on everything. Again, MS is not the company I'd like to see doing this.

*Rather Offtopic - but Digital Convergence used to advertise the CueCat with an 'Angel coming down to earth from heaven to barcode everything' and the well-known Digital Angel RFID people have also made a religious reference in the company's name. The hue and cry of Christian's 'the number of the beast' references beg the question:

Who the hell is doing marketing for these people? I remember getting an icky feeling when I saw the 'infomercial' for the CueCat, and similarly the Digital Angel website. And I'm not the 'churchy' type. I can only imagine what the fundies think...

* This idea is copyrighted. Use of this idea may not be used to more attractively market 'evil' technology, or put a chip in my head. Thanks.

Troubling?

[110010001000]

How is this "troubling"? They are researching a way to make USENET and such more effective. They aren't interested in the fact that cmdrtaco@slashdot.org posted to alt.sex.unicorns 10 times last month.

This is good valid research, the type that applied research CS programs should be doing. Thismay actually make a difference in a deployed product.

I think we should tone done the M$ and SCO crap for a while.

I've seen some of the tracking ...

[galego]

The University of Maryland HCIL had a conference earlier this year. I was in the same hand-held session this guy was in. I checked his picture, and that's him for sure.

The next day he was showing Ben Schneiderman some of this stuff at the open house. A bunch of us looked on as they chatted, planned visits, golf outings and talked about how it all worked.

Depending on the queries he gave it, this one program would chew through data from usenet. and give back all kinds of stats and then draw relationships It even did graphical representaitons of users' actvity. Density of posts in a single thread versus starting new threads, frequency of posts, replies vs. new messages etc would be denoted by distance from the main timeline, darkness and width of the circel and so forth. You would look at a wide but faint circle and say (and I may be off in how the key worked, but ...) "This guy sticks to the topic over a long period of time" or you could denote the flame warrior or the vagrant by their graphical representation and so forth. The way the data was processed was really cool and how quickly you could start to decipher the keys was really interesting.

The Big brother implications ... well that's a whole 'nother thing there too isn't it?

This is cool! This headline is utterly unfair!

[Effugas]

One of the first tasks of any individual joining a group is to determine the pecking order within which authority is distributed. This is a critical task that humans have been doing since before they were human.

What's being talked about here is reverse engineering trust heirarchies, algorithmically, simply from a discussion corpus extracted from Usenet.

This is very, very cool stuff. It is a hard application of a soft science, and if its results match empirical data, it represents a greater level of understanding about the human mind.

This is something to celebrate and take interest in, not malign simply because it's Microsoft that's behind it.

I do remind the security paranoid that reputation management remains one of the few characteristics obsessively protected in otherwise anonymous systems.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com