Data Mining for Fun and Profit

Tom Owad at applefritter.com has posted a detailed story on how he was able to use Amazon wishlists to profile thousands of people. By using the search function at Amazon, he accessed and downloaded over 260,000 publicly-available wishlists. He then searched the lists for "suspicious" books and authors, including Fahrenheit 451, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, the Koran/Quran and, of course, Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects.

At this point, Tom has a list of Amazon usernames and has identified any "suspicious" books and author that appear on that user's wishlist. But there's more. Amazon allows a user to include their city and state information on their wishlist, so Tom has the information to take it to the next level: a Google map.

Link To Original Article

[suijuris]

Heh, that is my idea of fun!

[idknow]

wow and to think that anyone in gubmint of more than moderate intelligence can think of doing that too

the mind reels