i already know i am crazy but....psychological profiling on the web of users!!

this article is about technology to gauge the mood and mental health of persons who post in forums, twitter, myspace etc. and then deciding what to do about it for good or bad....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-100...g=2547-1_3-0-5

apparently Microsoft will host a conference where this new tool is to be revealed in October. The article suggests it might be used to cut the murder rate. I seriously doubt that.
-pi

<font color="purple">Oh geez.

I really DON'T like this idea, my moodswings are nobody's buissness unless I want them to be. </font>

i went to the presenter's website to look at his cv. it is less alarming than the initial cnet post. on the other hand, a case of tomaine poisoning would be less alarming than the cnet post. anyway, here's his abstract for the 'bluehat' conference....

TITLE: Suddenly Psychic: Knowing Everything About Everyone

ABSTRACT:
Imagine a world where you can remotely influence other people's behavior. This talk will expose how information about people in the physical world, coupled with voluntary information from new communication paradigms such as social networking applications, can enable you to remotely read people's minds to influence their behavior.

Topics of discussion will include:

Techniques on how individuals may be remotely influenced by focused marketing and messaging tactics, and how criminal groups and governments may abuse this capability.
Reconnaissance and pillage of confidential information, including intellectual properties owned by businesses.
Falsified profiles used to construct undeserved reputation as well as the risk of reputation tarnish.
Remote behavior analysis that can be used to construct personality profiles to predict current and future psychological states of targeted individuals, including discussions on how emotional and subconscious states can be discovered even before the target is consciously aware. This topic will be extended to demonstrate the possibility of criminal abuse and the enablement of economic drivers.
Decreasing the value of social networks through data poisoning attacks.
The goal of this presentation is to raise consciousness on how the new paradigms of social communication bring with it real risks as well as marketing and economic advantages. Perspectives on negative and positive uses will be presented in addition to academic discussions and thoughts on how to enable the upcoming online social age.

and here's a post about methodology from one of the models used...
http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.

so every ten minutes these guys use computers to 'harvest feelings.' then they make a special map and decide what's the happiest place in the world etc.etc.
i am beginning to think i fell down the rabbit hole with alice.
-pi

This was a little more than I care to delve in this early in the morning so I didn't read it all. Still, if we're careful about giving out personal information, stay on this site that is as well protected as it can be and do like I do and not listen to advertisements/commercialism, wouldn't you cut your chances of being "harvested"?

This site is my only "socialization" on the web and even that is limited.

-pi! Come out of that rabbit hole!

you know i thought i was safe here and i pretty much am. but there are some security holes here and i have found them without looking for them.
i am sure the forum move on saturday will change all that so i wont spin everybody's wheels for nothing.
i will say this much...if you are not sure if you are safe here then do a google search of your user name and see what comes up.
at one point i saw my name and id in a cached ad on google from another doctor john site. since i used this user name in one other forum for dating purposes my potential matches know a bit more about me than i intended to tell them.
-pi