Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

January 9, 2006 | Source: applefritter

An individual with access to the Internet can develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens by using data mining of free and publicly available resources, such as Amazon.com’s vast database of wishlists, as programmer Tom Owad has proved.

He extracted names and cities for readers of “dangerous books” to show how easy it is. Their addresses and Google maps their homes could also have been determined.