NY Times To Data-Mine Its Visitors

pilsner.urquell points out a story in the Village Voice from a stockholders' meeting at the New York Times. It seems that the media giant is now eager to data-mine visitors to its Web properties. Of course anybody with a site who profits from advertising is likely to be doing something of the sort. It's just a bit surprising that the Times would use the words "data mining" out loud in public. From the article: "Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits... [T]he problem with reading papers electronically is that they can also read you."

Comments

Obligatory??

[Anonymous Coward]

[T]he problem with reading papers electronically is that they can also read you.

So, how are we supposed to make Soviet Union jokes after this??

Re:Obligatory??

[goombah99]

Wow an insightful pithy first post. I suppose that since I assume all commerical sites, especially free one, are data mining me and selling me out in anyway they can I'm not worried by this. In fact I think it shows a lot of integrity by the NY times to announce their intentions ahead of time as it can only be bad PR.

Re:Obligatory??

[Intron]

"shows a lot of integrity"

Except they didn't put it in an announcement to the website visitors, they announced to their stockholders that they planned to make more money.

Anyway, I think everyone visiting the NYT site from now on should do a search for "elephant porn" and we'll see how that affects their advertising budget.

Hello Bug Me Not

[fishdan]

OR some other similar service. When are sites going to learn that we CAN protect out privacy if the force us too. You catch more flies with honey...

Re:Hello Bug Me Not

[NoTheory]

The problem is that this is a functional analysis. Even if they don't have your legitimate contact details, they know what you've been browsing, and if at some point they can attach it to your legitimate contact details, then boom they've got the whole shebang. This is a privacy unfriendly move. It makes it more difficult for you to maintain your anonymity. Services like bug-me-not are insufficient because it requires you to try out multiple contact details, and maintain a list of valid contact details (which can be made all the more difficult of the organization is active in closing these accounts).

Even if you think people should be more privacy conscious, this is a bad move, that makes everyone less private. The irony of the situation is really the only thing that makes it notable. Stupid NYT.

Papers read you!

[maxwell demon]

"[T]he problem with reading papers electronically is that they can also read you."
Wow, a Soviet Russia joke directly in the summary!

Data Mining and issue?

[rodney dill]

I'm not sure why there is such a concern over data mining. As long as the mining is done from public sources then I see no problem. If the mining is from medical records, government records that are sealed or presumed to be private, or some other protected database then is becomes an issue.

Re:Data Mining and issue?

[superbus1929]

Where does it stop? Once you get comfortable with data mining, will you also have to get comfortable with more than just your IP attached? Will you be comfortable with someone having a full consumer database of John Doe, instead of just 10.10.10.220? Will you be comfortable with your profile being viewable to everyone that wants it? Will you be comfortable being positively unable to get away from Capitalism even for a second?

I'm not trying to put on a tin foil hat by any means; if it was just "hey, so many people like Coke over Pepsi!", I'd be cool. But anything further than that, and I view it as a slippery slope.

Re:Data Mining and issue?

[noidentity]

There's a fundamental difference between a company doing demographics, and the government spying on citizens. The company doesn't care about any person in particular, just common trends, and simply changes how they design/market their products. At worst, it means they can more effectively sell you junk you don't need. The government's use of data is pretty much the opposite.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

[LMacG]

I have a login for the NYT. According to the information I provided, I'm a female born in 1901, living in ZIP code 90210.

(For the record, at least one of those data points is incorrect).

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[truthsearch]

Gabrielle Carteris, is that you?

So they used a scary phrase.

[harks]

Data mining, she told the crowd, would be used "to determine hidden patterns of uses to our website."

So they used a scary phrase, but there isn't anything nefarious about noticing that people who read articles on subject X might want to see a link to article Y.

No news

[VincenzoRomano]

Almost all websites do it!
This is a reason why cookies are used and why almost all browsers provide mechansms to filter them out!

There is no free lunch

[anoopjohn]

Recently there was this big debate on slashdot about google's purchase of doubleclick. Why would you care if your usage patterns are tracked by a company - without attaching it to your personal identity - and deliver targeted advertisements. There is no free lunch. You are paying for the free content by selling your usage patterns. They don't want to do it in any other way. You can leave it or take it. Perhaps at some point of time in the future there would be ad-free subscription based content. I doubt, though.

I run a company and I face the same problem - How to reach the set of people who are most likely to be my customers. The more successfully I can do that, the lower would be my marketing cost, and the cheaper would the product be in the long run. Ultimately if we have a system where each person sees only those ads that he needs to see we would have a highly efficient marketing system with the lowest marketing costs. A reasonably big percentage of the cost of most products you buy are marketing costs. So if you would like them to be cheaper - stop complaining and start selling your usage data.

There is only one issue here - privacy advocates have to ensure that there is no real breach of privacy in the process. If googlebot sees the mails i see there is no problem, but if googlebot reads my mail and checks against some preset filter and requests Mr X to take a look at my mail then it is a breach of privacy. As long as the identity is kept separate from the patterns there shouldnt be any problem