Data Mining 101
Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists | Applefritter
The Electronic Frontier
Foundation points to this article that describes in detail how data mining works. It uses the Amazon.com “wish lists” (which many people make public), open source tools, and a little ingenuity to
locate people who want to read “subversive” books. It even creates maps showing where they live.
This article has a lot of technical detail, but the interest for most librarians will be in how simple it is to use reading interests to create a profile of a person. The author notes:
This is what’s possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon’s entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an “authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.
On a final note, the FBI is now hiring computer scientists to implement a project that sounds very similar to what I just did…