Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Newsgroup Posters 543
theodp writes "Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." Those concerned that it's not a good idea for computers to track their belongings and whereabouts are advised that they may ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses."
What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Insightful)
My god, you are so naive.
In-house sociologist (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading this thread makes me want to rant-post on some of their boards! They should buy out the Church of $cientology too. That would make a great team.
He has clue (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a very important thing. And we have build NetScan to protect what I think are legitimate claims for privacy. Like a Net spider, NetScan takes publicly accessible documents off the Internet, and it respects metadata that says "Leave me alone!" There is the robots.txt file that says, "You can look at this but not that." With Usenet there is one that says "Leave my messages alone," and we respect that. We will not store your messages if you put that in them.
So tell me again why this is stuff that matters?
so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the early days of netnews... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if Microsoft weren't doing this, wouldn't there be articles appearing with titles such as "Microsoft ignores valuable customer feedback available free on Internet"? I am no big fan of Redmond, but I think they are almost forced to do something like this to avoid being blindsided.
sPh
Slashdot Karma or Google PageRank (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like a Google PageRank implemented Newsgroup posters instead of Web Sites, and run by Microsoft instead of Google. Microsoft is just adding true statistics and tracking to the already existant "human credibility" of posters.
Newgroups posts are public.
I don't see this as a problem.
-Pete
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Real Information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that this is some sort of plot of evil. Well it sorta is, but the whole motivation behind any kind of information gathering is money. They want to spend less on advertising by targeting only the people who will show interest in thier products. The more they watch people like this the more money potential they have.
The best way to keep your privacy from becoming an issue and all of these information databases getting merged on you is to NEVER, EVER give out your real information to ANYBODY, especially on the internet, unless it's a secure SSL transaction, and you really trust the source.
Dupe? (Score:2, Insightful)
What!?!?!? WHAT?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm JUDGED by what I say in PUBLIC?
MY GOD!
The only thing that bothers me is that MSFT pisses away stockholder cash on this, unless they can somehow turn it into legitimate market research.
BTW, they read slashdot too. If the editors cared about this sort of "invasion of privacy", they'd remove the AC posting limit.
And why does a site so rabid over the issue of online anonymity have to refer to anyone who chooses to post as such as a coward?
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many companies (stars often check out what fans are saying around the net) are probably scoping out message boards/newsgroups to see what people are saying about their products. And plenty of people have opinions about various products but most people are less than stellar when it comes to intelligently expressing why they feel the way they do.
"It sucks" is not helpful to companies in their quest to improve their products. And people who bitch about everything or praise everything also aren't worth paying attention to.
It's called market research. This is a non story. "I want to have an opinion about X but X better not read it!" is just dense.
Ben
Re:Paranoia (Score:2, Insightful)
Check your head, fella.
They actually research their customer base. Imagine that.
If the GNU/Linux community would take note, and start reading what users are saying, perhaps we'd have a usable desktop by now.
Chinese Gov't Should Love This (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft - the boogieman (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no different than any social study on the general public. It's done in academia all the time.
If someone thinks their Usenet posts are so damn sensitive or private they don't want people to look at or study them later, don't post to Usenet or use an anonymizing service.
2003: Life after 1984 (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only is it a near limitless cache of information, there is near limitless ways to use it. They can market new crap, er, products to us; determine how to repackage and (attempt to) re-sell information to anyone who may buy.
You post info to misc.transport.road, for example, on the lastest news regarding the Maumee River crossing project (the massive I-280 bridges in Toledo, Ohio), you'll get spammed, er notified about Micro$oft Streets and Trips 2004.
Post a concert review on another newsgroup, and you might get something from Ticketmaster. And guess who gets a cut: some software company in Redmond.
Not to be paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, but it should be evident to anyone with even a couple of firing synapses that Microsoft is no longer a software business. Software is only a stepping stone to a larger avenue of revenue: human thought, human knowledge, human behavior, and the exploitation thereof in any way whatsoever - so long as it provides a revenue stream.
Quote from the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
We sociologists don't like to use the term "community," particularly--we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces.
Ugh! Where do I start?!
SocioloGY might be trying to answer interesting questions, but mefears that socioloGISTS might be the wrong people for the job.
Re:Good thing that guy isn't a programmer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:When they... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like keeping track of poster through karma ratings?
Re:Troubling? (Score:2, Insightful)
Good and valid research unfortunately doesn't mean publicly shared results.
Re:I read the article! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about support costs. Supporting newsgroups is very cheap and also very easy to farm out overseas to folks who really do nothing but paste in answers from scripts.
In Soviet America, the usenet . . . . (Score:0, Insightful)
Regardless, the following line of the post raised a blip on whatever passes for my interest.
Naturally, I'm posting before reading the article (What, you fools, it's the blog for god's sake, knee-jerking is required; just call it "immediate reaction commentary" and pass it off as a "feature" of blogging.); but regardless of the article author's position on identity fragmentation, an important fact leaks out in the statement.
If trackers expect, and adjust for identity fragmentation by tracked, then they are likely to ultimately rely on measures built by society to avoid identity theft for purposes of their tracking (For example, determining that fooyoutrackingguys@hotmail.com is also bararegularguy@hotmail.com would be beneficial for whatever purposes the original tracking and correllation system was intended for. Determining that the fragmented identities represented by those monikers are in fact one identity by appealing to data that may not be legally falsified by the identity creator is likely. Think about the real reason companies ask for a US customer's SSN if they can). The ability of the trackers to appeal to a legal device that the tracked may not falsely state clearly gives an advantage in the "identity fragmentation game" to the trackers.
But everyone knows that.
The real question is, in the hue-and-cry for legislating barriers to identity theft, will any rights to non-fraudulent identity fragmentation be protected?
Brought to you by the
It's a PUBLIC FORUM (Score:2, Insightful)
Wake up, people. If Microsoft (or you, or me, or the US Government, or frickin' aliens) want to track what people post on Usenet, then so what?
It's a public forum, not person to person email or a mailing list!
How else do you think Google archives it?
Why is google better? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know why they do this (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea is astoundingly simple. There are net.personalities that are considered trolls and their are net.personalities whose advice is largely regarded as "gospel". These companies are basically trying to figure out why it is that some people are listened to, almost religously, so that they can apply what they learn to their own advertising.
Cheers.
Large thread != good thread (Score:4, Insightful)
What we've done is highlight the 40 threads that got the most number of messages in this period--day, week, month, year. And we'll say, Here are 40 really big threads.
Well, at least he's found a meal ticket. I mean almost anybody's who's spent ANY time on USENET knows that the size of a thread is a poor predictor of useful or interesting content. While there is a chance that the thread is interesting, there is also a VERY good chance that it's a mishmash of flames and massivily offtopic digressions. This is clearly demonstrated by the netscan application referenced in the article.
why is this bad (Score:2, Insightful)
The Point (Score:2, Insightful)
Lots of folks already do this. Some folks do it by hand. Many usenet stalkers, for instance. I'm sure there are other companies doing it, too, though most are probably doing much less sophisticated (but possibly more perturbing) analysis. And anyone who doesn't think many, many government agencies (from most countries) are sifting through usenet data has their head in the sand.
This has always gone on. Once there was DejaNews (now Google) more was inevitable.
If you don't want your public data tracked and analyzed, you'd better not have any public data!
Re:Since the early days of netnews... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't post in public forums. No wait, DOOOH
Never mind
Re:I read the article! (Score:2, Insightful)
Newsgroup support is becoming a big thing around Microsoft Product Support.
Funny for an organization whose main selling point against open source is centrally provided corporate support.
I don't (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going to pretend to be anyone else.
Want to dredge up all the postings I've made anywhere on the internet? Go ahead. WTF do I care. If I didn't want people to read it and know it came from me, Barlo, I would not have posted it.
microsoft may actually get the internet someday... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that one quote is particularly interesting:
I don't know how hard Microsoft is going to listen to this sociologist, but he groks what a young Finnish grad student understood twelve years ago...
Which newsgroups? (Score:2, Insightful)
It implied it was only interested in who provides community support to whom, which implies they are only tracking the microsoft.public.* groups, which they own, host and propogate.
I don't think they're interested in who's posting to alt.binaries.linus.naked. More Slashdot FUD folks, nothing to see here.
Have any of you heard of the Microsoft MVP program [mvps.org]? It is a way to recognize the people who provide free peer support in the MS newsgroups. To be nominated as an MVP you must have a certain number of correct and relevant responses in the newsgroups. How else are they going to pick someone to be an MVP if they can't track?
Re:I read the article! (Score:2, Insightful)
Google is a great search index, but they are very, very evil in many things they do:
http://www.google-watch.org
Moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
Take A F**king Stand against free speech? (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
Politician: I voted for X.
You: The politician voted for X, but X kills babies.
Response: We need X its saves lives, its only killed one baby and that baby was dropped on its head anyway.
See, all speeches and counter-speeches are important, including action as speech.
Another example:
Me: Thanks for the transaction, I like how you do business.
Another: Yeah, and its because I only do business with white people.
Me: You what? I'm sorry, I can't support that, this will be our last transaction.
Yes, speech does and should have the potential for very real tangible consequences. Just never from the government. Thats what Free Speech is truly all about.
There is nothing to fear from reaction speech. If you listen to the counter-point, you may actually find out you were wrong in the first place. Then where would we be without the counter-point? Free speech does not stop with the initial speaker.
Now since you got off-topic a bit: The point I think you were trying to make about consequences...My arguement to that is, if you put it on the internet, expect it to be read and recorded. If you don't you are just dangerously naive. And if you didn't want it to be read, why did you put it there anyway?
I'm glad that the majority of posters... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is NOT big brother. This is about building valuable meta information on top of usenet. Why ? Because one of the things MS heard long ago is that people liked linux because they could go to a newsgroup and get help with it, often from the people that wrote the component in question ? What did MS do ? They responded - MS employees now monitor the microsoft.public news groups. We respond to posts, try and solve problems for people, answer questions, debug code, etc etc. I myself can be found occasionally posting in the Visual Basic newsgruops (where we have lots and lots of non-full-time or beginning programmers that really need just a little bit of help to get them going).
The people that _write_ the VB compiler are now monitoring VB newsgroups to try and help connect with real customers and to really understand how people use and dislike MS products.
Managing and making sense out of the whole mess that is usenet is a nightmare, and MS Research is doing some good work in this area. MS has some internal software that treats usenet posts as "issues" and determines if they've been resolved or not, if they need followup, etc etc. One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something.. like i said i don't know the details of that at all..
In any case, the point of this usenet data mining is to try and analyze the incredibly huge sea of usenet. We want to figure out what kinds of problems people have, what people are causing noise, what people are really helping other, etc etc. There is no nefarious invasion of privacy here, the only thing that is analyzable is what people explicitly post to a public forum...
Look at my userid - i was a slashdot reader long before i work where i currently do. Back then, the MS bashing and second guessing definitely took place, and i even participated. I'm still a slashdot reader but I do get awfully tired of the sheer volume and irrationality of negative-MS stuff that happens here.
When I started at MS, I found out awfully fast that many of my arguments against MS were speculative, but mostly it was me being factually wrong and talking out of my ass. I remember in my original interviews i was trying to lecture an NT developer about how putting GDI in kernel for NT4 was stupid because it would lead to crashes. How pompous of me! It was something I read on some stupid website or industry rag. Later I found out (from reading Inside W2k -- excellent book) that it was irrelevant because if the session manager sees that the GDI user-land process exits
So after 8+ years of hating MS and talking out of my ass, followed by 3+ years of working at MS and realizing how much i was talking out of my ass, I'm doing two things:
1) talking out of my ass less
2) telling others that are clearly talking out of their ass that they are doing so, so that they can
2a) stop spreading misinformation
2b) have their eyes opened that nobody is impressed by their incorrect speculations and their emotional campaigns of disinformation
I know im not preaching to a sympathetic audience here, but honestly, the speculation, questions, etc people have about MS could be answered truthfully and honestly if some of you would bother to ask, or do some research. But unfortuneately i know all to well (because i used to do it) that its easier, and certainly more fun, to beleive everything you _want_ to beleive about MS that bolsters your own predetermined mindset. If, for example, you find yourself referring to an article that The Register wrote, please stop and ask yourself what the hell the regis
Re:When they... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or Take A Fucking Stand (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Your freedom of speech does not guarantee anything in the private sector. I.e. it does not guarantee your employment contract, your image, your customers, others' opinions about you, or others' actions taken based on opinions expressed from your free speech. In other words, you may well express bad opinions about your employer, but your employer does not have to keep employing you as their salesperson, or spokesperson. Your may badmouth your customers, but they don't have to keep paying for your product or service. What you said is very wrong on so many levels, most of all that your free speech right would trump others' free speech and other rights as well.
It is obvious if you read the U.S. Constitution (the document you are referring to) that it refers to Government's actions to censor free speech, not your private life.
Re:I'm glad that the majority of posters... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it possible to unbundle the browser from Win95?
MS: No you honor. It is impossible.
Microsoft will tell whatever lies are necessary to continue their unfair trade practices. Stop trying to justify their behavior and just admit that you have in fact sold out.
I've kept an open mind about MS's products for the nearly 20 years I've been exposed to them. My opinions are not predetermined, but if it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
limited insight. (Score:3, Insightful)
Read, fine. Study, great. Honestly disiminate? Right, you think Microsoft is going to tell you the truth or something? Give me a break.
Microsoft has a track record of Astroturfing a mile long, extending all the way back to Steve Barkto's spamming of newsgroups. They hire PR firms to pretend to be Apple to M$ switchers, to write letters on their behalf from dead people to politicians, lie about company afiliations at meetings of shcool teachers. All of this is outside their usual multi-billion dollar marketing blitz to buy your trust. Sorry, good products and software don't need that kind of promotion and stuff built to facilitate it is junk.
Given that kind of record, we can only expect bad things out of Microsoft's newsgroups efforts. I imagine they will steer their OS users without their knowledge or consent, make it even more difficult to get anything useful out of the internet with their sortware, and focus their trolling on forums and newsgroups that don't favor them.
Marc says he's been working on this for four years. I'd love to see what he has found and how he presents it to his boss. "Boss, we looked at newsgroups and what we found was widespread, virulent and well earned hatred of us. Ouside our astroturfers, no one has anything nice to say and the repitition of phrases is embarassingly noticable. We need more buzzwords."
Like I said, reading and study is fine. What Microsoft is liable to do with it is not, judging by the way they have abused their resources in the past.
Estimating number of news group users. (Score:2, Insightful)
My guess is that this an overestimate. I suspect that most lurkers might actually post one per year. It could probably be worked out. If you know the distribution of posts, say 5 million post once, 2 million post twice, ... then you have a guess at the distribution,
and that could give you a good estimate for total number. My guess
is a zipth law or poission type distribution.
Re:Real Information? (Score:3, Insightful)
Beauty, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech or Privacy [privacyinternational.org].
Anyone who chooses to exercise Free Speech becomes 0wned by whomever wants to profile&dossier 'em, and anyone who chooses to exercise Privacy has the right to not say anything.
I wonder, in this Majority Rule ( and all others must Obey & Conform & Belong ) world, whether "free speech" will win, or whether "privacy" will win...
... keeping-in-mind that no individual has as much capability to make a meaning known ( or to do-so as a means of suppressing competing meaning ) as does a marketing-department, and
.. also that Total Information Awareness programs, whether called STASI or Satan, or any other label
.. depends entirely on no-one having valid privacy...
( humour is: "satan" means Accuser, and TIA + Patriot-II [public-i.org] exists so that authority can accuse without having to have correct information, and without you having the right to see the basis for your accusation, and without you having the right to defend yourself in level-playing-field and without anyone, anywhere having the right to know you've been accused/convicted/disappeared.. read the link. )
Perfectly Brilliant.