Minor Technical Difficulties

Thanks for stopping by! Hopefully, you enjoyed the “What Your Grocery List Says About Your Sex Life” talk at Ignite DC #4. Here are some additional items of information and supporting documentation that may help further explain some of the ideas found in the presentation.

Some Brief Comments

The underlying topic of discussion for the talk is data mining and how it affects privacy.

Data mining, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad; it’s just another tool like a hammer, a firearm or an automobile. A hammer can build a house or tear it down; a firearm can protect someone from an attacker or be used to attack the person in question; an automobile can take you to the bank to deposit your money or take the thief away from the bank after the robbery.

Data mining as a tool is here to stay; it’s too valuable to everyone — consumers, businesses, governments. Within the data glut we are experiencing, the ability to find useful information in the tsunami of data rolling past us is worth the cost. The question before us is how to best manage the application of the tool. In the US, the default position is that there is vaguely defined “expectation of privacy” and the government acts to protect the individual from the government. In the EU, the default position of privacy is one where the individual has control and the government acts to protect the individual from corporations. Both are defensible positions, but each carries with it a cost.

Annotated Slide Deck

The slide deck used in the talk can be found here (pdf). The images have been watermarked with a URL, as I paid for them from iStockPhoto and they deserve their money. It’s a good stock photo site; if you need the same images (or others like it), that’s a good place to go…

Useful Links:

• CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
• Connect The Dots As 19th Century British Porn, The-Fed.org
  • La Putain Disposée, Drawn In
• Data Mining Is Big Business For Kroger & Getting Bigger All The Time, KY Post, June 2010
• Assessment Of ChoicePoint by EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center
• The Frying Game, Out magazine, April 2000
• Gift Card Statistics, Meridian Merchant Services
• Gift & Loyalty Card Statistics, The Kennady Group
• Loyalty Cards: Reward Or Threat, Consumer Affairs
• An Introduction To Data Mining, Kurt Thearling
• OpenBook, A Site To Show What Parts Of Your Facebook Profile Are Publicly Available
• Pipl.com, a very good search engine for people and/or stalking
• Predicting Retail Customers’ Share-Of-Wallet Using Shopper Loyalty Card Data, Southern Methodist University
• Safeway Club Card Application, Safeway.com
• What Does FaceBook Publish About Me/My Friends, Zesty.ca