NY Times To Data-Mine Its Visitors

pilsner.urquell points out a story in the Village Voice from a stockholders' meeting at the New York Times. It seems that the media giant is now eager to data-mine visitors to its Web properties. Of course anybody with a site who profits from advertising is likely to be doing something of the sort. It's just a bit surprising that the Times would use the words "data mining" out loud in public. From the article: "Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits... [T]he problem with reading papers electronically is that they can also read you."

Re:No news - Still news...

[haibijon]

Even if you disable cookies, its trivial to pass a session id through the url to maintain a user's authenticated session. They'd still be able to determine which/what article you were reading and provide 'similar' links etc. Not to mention that most cookies are used to track and maintain user logins and server sessions, not to data mine... NYT is saying that they're explicitly going "to determine hidden patterns of uses to our website." using data mining, this isn't about Cookies, its about the tracking and monitoring of browsing habits.

Re:Data Mining and issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stealing cookies?

Web bugs?

Script injection/invisible framing?

And the easiest - seeing which site you came from before you hit their server.

If you think "data mining" is going to stop at "this IP read these pages at this date," you're a sucker.

Re:Garbage in garbage out

[Jonathan]

I can assure you that "average" people *do* give out accurate information; when I tell my relatives that I generally just give random info, they tend to be shocked and say "But, but, that would be LYING".

Re:No news - Still news...

[RetroGeek]

If you do this, then you only need to change some part of the string to a random value, then hit enter.

When the page refreshes, then click on the link you want to read.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Sure they are tracking something, but it will not be you.

There are lots of ways to monkey with this sort of thing.

Re:f you and your buzzwords

[iminplaya]

Well, he may be right. I don't know the official definition of "data mining" (and really don't care). By itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing. But like like GM foods, I want to see a label. For the moment, I assume that everybody is data mining, and will block it where I think it's appropriate. It's really nothing more than typical top down 19th century business practice and its attempt to stay alive. I would like to make a point of showing that it is in their interests to look for another way to conduct business that doesn't use personal information by making this one as unworkable and expensive as possible. The old methods no longer apply.