You might think it was bad enough to have the NSA prying into our lives, but now folks outside the government are doing the same. Really, just demonstrating it can be done: Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. Via: Schneier on Security. A regular guy (ok, a regular hackery sort of guy) figured out how to get and analyze the contents of over 200k Amazon wishlists. Very interesting stuff.
I wonder how long it will take Amazon to close the holes in their conditions of use, and robots.txt file, and possible to make it impossible to repeat this activity. After all, this kind of analysis is one of the things that allows Amazon to add the value they do, and I cannot imagine they’d like others being able to do it as well.
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