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Data Mining Amazon.com Wish Lists
Dr. Webster writes "In his article "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists," Tom Owad of Applefritter outlines a way in which one could build detailed personal profiles of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens in a matter of hours. Reading habits, personal tastes and even political party affiliation could be inferred from the results, and through the use of Yahoo! People and Google Maps, one could even map out geographically where people with certain interests or affiliations live, down to their address. Most surprisingly, the process of doing this is completely legal, and doesn't even violate Amazon's Conditions of Use."
Did you RTFA?
He maps out (using google maps) the locations of the people who read certain books.
A lot of these wishlists have a city, state, full name and birthdate attached to them... which is more than enough for google to give you a street address (though not always with 100% accuracy)
Just to test it, i randomly picked a 'sarah' who had a wishlist. Turns out there's only one Sarah Johnson in Portland, OR.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In my county in NC, if you want a party affiliation all you need to do is look it up on the public records website:f m
http://www.co.durham.nc.us/common/PublRecordsdB.c
You can also figure out how much someone's house is worth, what they paid in taxes, etc.
It starts to get a little scary though when your search for public records reveals mortage applications with the individual's SS# listed on the sheet. All available online, and provided for by your very own government!
Look at a dozen random wishlists and you'll find the same pattern. Customer tried wishlist on December 11, 2002. Added Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Never used wishlist function again.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Naturally, this has immediately turned into a discussion on government surveillance... so...
Let's see if I understand this...
A bunch of people in America, all from a peace loving and gentle religious background, flew airplanes into skyscrapers, attempting to kill tens of thousands of people and succeeding in murdering more than the Japanese killed in Pearl Harbor. This was 8 years after another group, from the same peace loving and gentle religious background, used a large bomb in an attempt to achieve the same result. Since then, more of these folks have made (loving and gentle) efforts to kill more of us, and some of those efforts were thwarted by wiretaps and data mining. They succeeded in Spain and England and a few other spots.
These gentle people carry out the desires of 10s of millions of their co-religionists, and are funded by huge amounts of money from these supporters and rogue states. In the near future, these gentlemen are going to have portable nuclear weapons, and the clear intent of setting them off in American cities.... Slashdotters should realize that this will, at the minimum, mess up the internet for a while and perhaps destroy some of their favorite porn sites. It will also kill a bunch of their fellow Slashdotters, who made the poor choice of living in the target areas. It will certainly lead to extreme reductions in personal privacy, which will be demanded by most surviving Americans. Oh, and it will destroy the economy, leaving most Slashdot readers with no toy budget (except for those who are drafted).
BUT... most Slashdot readers are more scared of what the FBI might know about them... an organization that doesn't have the time to even keep track of more than a few of the literally tens of thousands of trained terrorists who wish to do worse than 9-11, was shown to be decades behind in computer technology, and hasn't the slightest interest in your reading habits unless you plan to blow someone up.
AND... few of the readers and commenters are aware of the history of civil liberties during times of war in America, the fact that they were seriously limited but with few abuses, and that the end of the war led to an increase of civil liberties beyond the pre-war conditions.
SO Slashdotters will go to bed at night, hiding under their blankets, in fear that the G-men monsters will soon slip from their closets and pop out from under their beds.
SIGH!
When there is a gigantic gorilla in the room, worrying obsessively about the faint possibility that an ant might get in is beyond reason!
Now, I will pause for the next 500 comments obsessing over the abuses this capability *might* be used for against, I guess, innocent Slashdot readers, and of course little old ladies using libraries, and attacking me for being blind to such an enormous threat to my privacy... To which I ask.... so frigging what if the FBI knows what I read? They investigated me for security violations when I was 6 years old (true story), and that didn't hurt at all.
Errr... isn't this sort of silly?
Meanwhile, considering what spammers might do with this information would be more interesting, since the misuse might actually actually bother some of us.
The only good weather is bad weather.
When they first started the idea, they gave it some PR, but now it's sort of a low man on the totem pole, relegated to the backwaters. When I checked 6400+ cities, only 2800 of them were recording enough activity to warrant a bestseller or "uniquely popular" list.
They generate the 2 types of lists for 5 classes of items: books, CDs, DVDs, toys, and consumer electronics. Now this might not be as potentially compromising as finding out a single person was ordering subversive books. Yet finding out a small town in Alabama's bestselling genre is showtunes is definitely something interesting.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
You're a fool. And yes, the company you work for is also an idiot for using john.smith@megacorp.com as your mandatory email address. All your doing is making an index for yourself into the biggest rolodex on the planet. People argue that some names are so regular no one could possibly narrow it down, but a simple whois can help narrow things down to a particular state. Public legal records from there can make things more interesting.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/092701hjpic .htm
I don't remember why at the time but it popped into my head to search the Amazon Wishlists. Upon entering an Alghamdi in Florida I found the following wishlist containing references to pilots guides to airports:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/?e ncoding=UTF8&type=wishlist&id=1UWSWIH3NXQJN
take note of the dates the items were added, well before the sept 11 attack, that this individual is ahmad vs ahmed (on the list), and also that no items have been added since this time period.
I immediately reported this to the FBI via their reporting form and suggested that wishlists could be used to openly and safely communicate needs. I never heard anything back so I can only assume it was investigated. If is was however, and found to be suspicious or related, I have no doubt that all open wishlists are now monitored for known aliases.
Note that this person may not be the hijacker. I've oft wondered since if some innocent pilot could be sitting secretly in jail because I found his wishlist.
I smurf everything and everything I smurf is perfect.
Okay, I'm counting for the last 60 years - long enough for you?
Number of Americans killed in the last 50 years by *the federal government* for expressing the wrong views: 0. This leads me to wonder who in your family you are referring to.
Number of Americans killed by government for expressing the wrong views:0
Number of Americans killed by government accidently during protests 4 that I know of, at Kent State.
Number of Americans by or on behalf of Joe McCarthy: 0 (but Joe McCarthy was certainly a person who injured people by abusing his office)
Number of Americans killed by right wing terrorists: about 200 (Oklahoma city, a few at abortion clinics, one at Atlanta Olypics)
Number of Americans killed by left wing and eco-terrorists: a few (Ted Kazynski, a few during the Vietnam war years. an acquaintance of mine was permanently injured, for the sin of being a university computer operator, by a left-wing bombing).
Number of Americans killed by Islamofascist terrorists: approximately 3000, most on 9-11; a few at the same WTC in 1993; a few in aircraft or cruise ship hijackings.
In other words, if one deconstructs your examples, they are best described as nonsense. The bad guys killed a whole lot more than the government. The *abuse* of government power was even less . If you look closely at the events leading up to 9-11, it was privacy rights absolutism that, in at least two events, prevented the attack from being stopped (there is a very good chance it would have been without that extremism).
If you studied World War II history, you would know that during THAT war, privacy rights and some other civil rights vanished. After the war they came back and became stronger than at any time in the nation's history. We are in a war in which counterintelligence is more important than any other we have fought, with the possible exception of the civil war (in which not only privacy rights disappeared, but so did habeas corpus). War requires sacrifice, and one of the things we have to do is wisely and carefully sacrifice some of our privacy rights.
The treatment of the Japanese, while certainly scooping up a lot of innocent people and detaining them, had nothing to do with privacy rights. If you want to see it repeated, just continue to advocate pro-terrorist policies such as privacy fundamentalism, and see what Americans due to Muslims and "Muslim-looking" people after a nuke goes off in one of our cities, which was my point. We already had a Sikh killed here in Arizona, just after 9-11, by a citizen not the much feared government, because they *thought* he was a Muslim. Don't you think that maybe the government would use some acquired personal information to prevent 9-11's in the future, if possible, thus reducing the likelihood of such attacks, and the probability of a generally agreed upon set of measures that make the Patriot Act look utterly trivial?
Finally, let's apply a little reason to government. If you are a libertarian and not cocmpletely looney, you know that the most important reason to have any government at all is to protect us against other citizens and foreign powers (in this case, stateless or state-backed terrorists). That is the FIRST purpose of government. We do this knowing that placing any power in the hands of government is a risk.
So the rational person tries to weigh the risks. I see that rarely in internet debate; rather, what appears is knee-jerk civil liberties absolutists.
Now, please tell me of *actual* cases where the government abused you, a familhy member, or someone you know. Note that abuse does NOT mean accidently detained or surveilled, but does mean intentionally used its powers for purposes of gaining power or money undemocratically.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Oddly enough, how many of the previous attacks on our children in our schools have been made by these tens of thousands of trained Islamofascist terrorists or those who support them? It usually seems to be done by a fellow American that has no ties to Islam.
The problem I and many others have is that we are pretty sure that even if the government had all the data mining capabilities in the world, a large terrorist organization will still find a flaw in the system and abuse it. The issue is not that we don't have enough information. The issue is that most of our governmental systems and security as a whole are lacking even the most basic competence. The overall end result? There are fights on what should be held private and what should not be while a larger issue is appears to be left ignored.
For every possible scenario you can produce on what might happen if we don't infringe more on everyone's privacy, I can produce actual situations where security (be it government or private) is particularily negligent and can let through a terrorist attack without issue right now.