Blog: Pete Loshin

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Data Mining for the Masses

If you read any of the same blogs I do, you're likely to see a link to this article by Tom Owad on Applefritter.com Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about the actual technologies used, other than the fact that they are all easily and cheaply (or freely) accessible to just about anyone with the time and interest in seeking them out.

In a nutshell, Tom rights about how he went about mining Amazon.com's wishlists to find anyone who might be interested in the kinds of things that subversives might be interested in. And then he shows how to extract locations and map them. All in all, a tidy demonstration of just how much too much information some people are more than willing to put out there.

A fascinating read for the details as well as this comment: "It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people."

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