New research conducted by Microsoft is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. See story here.
Skeptics of the validity of the research should note that experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy!
The approach taken by Microsoft doesn't sound a million miles away from propensity score matching, and it opens up new possibilities for doing work with anonymised web browsing history, if such data could be made available through a Freedom of Information request.
The team at Microsoft say they expect to be able to "refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information", and one day predict our occupations, and our levels of qualifications.
Another similar endeavour in this cyber-data approach is being conducted by the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking. They are funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks, such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Ringo and Facebook.
See more on this story here.
They are even considering the harnessing of advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" (championed by the web standards organisation W3C) - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Talk about an empirical economist's dream data!
Skeptics of the validity of the research should note that experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy!
The approach taken by Microsoft doesn't sound a million miles away from propensity score matching, and it opens up new possibilities for doing work with anonymised web browsing history, if such data could be made available through a Freedom of Information request.
The team at Microsoft say they expect to be able to "refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information", and one day predict our occupations, and our levels of qualifications.
Another similar endeavour in this cyber-data approach is being conducted by the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking. They are funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks, such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Ringo and Facebook.
See more on this story here.
They are even considering the harnessing of advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" (championed by the web standards organisation W3C) - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Talk about an empirical economist's dream data!
1 comment:
Big brother's getting a bit smart... Throw network analysis into the mix and you have a serious understanding of who's doing what, where, why and with whom. I'm sure the marketing companies are already on this case and google's tailored ad's are probably the tip of the ice-berg.
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