An Introduction to Data Mining

At the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh this week, there was a conversation on social networking data. Someone made the point that there are several different types of data, and it would be useful to separate them. This is my taxonomy of social networking data.

While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google’s search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly. The subtle relationship between privacy and control has complicated things for marketers, too. Advertisers talk about having to move away from analog-era “push” tactics and embracing digital-age “pull” strategies, in which consumers are enticed into seeking information about a product or brand, rather than having ads foisted on them.

Spelletjes, 'speciale' acties; het kunnen er niet genoeg zijn voor SBS om de databank te vullen met persoonsgegevens, teneinde communicatie over programma's en (vooral) voor adverteerders persoonlijker te maken. Dat levert binding en geld op.

'Ken uw kijker, luisteraar, bezoeker, klant!' Dit klinkt modern, is zelfs noodzakelijk. Wat vindt er plaats op dit terrein van de zogenoemde customer relationship management in en buiten Hilversum? Wat betekent privacy? Een inventarisatie.

What is more important, the rights of the mass, or the rights of the individual. In the western world we tend to assume an inverse relationship between individual rights and social control. More social control leads to less individual rights and vice versa. Marshall suggests that individual rights may be less important than the ‘greater cause’ of being able to provide more value to users if data is freely accessible.

Een beetje actieve burger op internet en in het maatschappelijk verkeer kan met persoonlijke data in duizenden bestanden staan. Van degene die probeert te ontsnappen ('de kluizenaar') blijft het aantal 'beperkt' tot 250. Het gemiddelde ligt naar een ruwe schatting op '250 tot 500 bestanden' per persoon.

The digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Het College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens is een onderzoek gestart om te toetsen hoe de RET omgaat met de afhandeling van privégegevens.

"So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender." - Social web engineering, wtf!

Ian Ayres, Yale Law School professor, Forbes columnist, and data fanatic has now written a book on data mining, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.