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.

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!

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).

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.

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.