Profiling Amazon Users
Here’s an interesting read. Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists takes a look at just how much information we can extract from publicly available data such as Amazon.com’s Wish List service. The wish list allows a user to bookmark items they would like either by coming back and purchase at a later date or telling people about as gift ideas. Thus it was the ideal database to extract amazon user’s political interests. More and More, the term data mining seems to be used in the USA to refer to privacy concerns of a government tool for spying on it’s citizens. That’s certainly the tone this article takes but it is still interesting to see what can be achieved using freely available data.
Searching on political and religious keywords the author generated a list of users and the books interested in. Although the user’s address information is hidden, he was able to use Yahoo! People Search to find their location and display the highlighted users on a customized Google Map. Anyway, its worth the read, so check it out.