Data mining

Data mining is the art of extracting “useful” information from data, usually a lot of data. If we could access, extract and make sense of information from:

  • calendar events
  • social network (friends)
  • what emails we write, to whom and how often
  • what information we look for in the Internet
  • what books we read
  • which rss feeds we read

we would have a quite accurate profile of a person. The fact is that this analysis is constantly done by all major search engines and not only by them. Every advertiser is trying to understand usersĀ“ habits. The scope is to understand better us in order to offer targeted services, services we (probably) like and want. Actually, the idea is sound. However, concerns regarding our privacy are legitimate. The big brother in 1984 by Orwell is a classic when we discuss about privacy concerns. A more recent book is Data Base Nation by Simon Garfinkel. This latest book is a great book and a good read. Still, it does not represent the curren situation since it was written when search engines were not as “powerful” as we see today.

At the moment, user location is not used, or at least, not yet…

A video worth a view

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