Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

[Generic Other]

Something else to worry about?

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
<snip>
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. Most of us don't have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example.

There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular Amazon wishlists.

Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. Amazon's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.

For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on Amazon.
For the purposes of this exercise, only a single name was chosen – a common male name that returned over 260,000 wishlists. I'm not going to divulge what name was actually used. Let's pretend it was "Edgar," in honor of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

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http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks

[kimpossible]

1. Yikes!

Heading straight to amazon to make my wishlist private!

[fed-up]

2. Make sure to have the books sent to the White House :) n/t

[pitohui]

6. stupid question but what's the point of a private wishlist?

i thought the whole point was to list books etc. others could buy for you

[ikojo]

3. Here's a scary website....

anyone can buy a list of calls made from any cell phone.....www.locatecell.com.

[Citrene]

4. K & R n/t

[sweetheart]

5. corporate information collection is more a threat than government

But we've long known that... and THAT is why it is outsource to corporations in the
first place, to undermine privacy beyond the control of government.

I'm glad the map is not global... is all... and i'll never use an amazon wish list again.

[Generic Other]

7. Now I'm all warm and paranoid again

Ah, life in the evil empire.

[Poll_Blind]

8. Hey I found Karl Rove's wish list!

No way am I going to post a link, go here and figure it. That was not to you, Generic Other, but others reading the message. I'm having a hell of alot of fun with that one right now.

PB