Over the past couple of years the use of social networking by people of all age groups has skyrocketed, prompting researchers to issue stern warnings about the potential of the extraction and misuse of personal data, or "stealing reality", in the future. Unfortunately, it seems that the future has arrived more quickly than anyone wanted to believe.
A new technique known as “scraping” is being utilized by some high profile corporations and small firms to extract personal data from social networking websites and sell it to marketers for a profit. While this is something that is unsurprising and actually expected on some sites, the problem is that it’s an unauthorized practice occurring with particularly sensitive data extracted from websites who have promised to keep user information confidential.
The owners of PatientsLikeMe.com, a support website for a variety of medical issues including depression and AIDS, found that messages in their members-only online forums had been copied to sell. The culprit? Nielsen Media Research, the very same firm that examines our television-viewing habits and whose clients include some big pharmaceutical corporations.
"I felt totally violated," said Bilal Ahmed, a PatientsLikeMe member. "It was very disturbing to know that your information is being sold."
And he should feel violated. Nielsen was taking personal information from a private forum without permission from anyone, including the sites operators.
And what does Nielsen have to say for themselves?
"It was a bad legacy practice that we don't do anymore," says Dave Hudson, the new chief executive of the Nielsen division that scraped PatientsLikeMe. "It's something that we decided is not acceptable, and we stopped."
But there are plenty of other firms out there who haven’t stopped, and have even increased the practice.
"Customers for whom we were regularly blocking about 1,000 to 2,000 scrapes a month are now seeing three times or in some cases 10 times as much scraping," says Marino Zini, managing director of Sentor Anti Scraping System, a company that specializes in blocking scrapers from websites.
Unfortunately, though the ethics of scraping are debatable, there’s nothing illegal about the process. Anything you post on a social network can be copied and sold by one of these companies at any time. It might even be sold to your employer.
As we reported earlier this week, a study was released by researchers who have been examining online social networking and predicted the emergence of this very issue.
Of course, people have been warned for years that nothing they post online is truly private. I believe, however, that too many people suffer from an “it can’t happen to me” mentality, which leads them to be careless. And once the information is posted, it isn’t easy to permanently delete.
This should serve as a wake-up call for many, but I think it’s going to take a lot more than people feeling violated before anything changes. People won’t change their habits or begin to fight back until they actually start losing jobs and feeling more “real” detrimental effects of scraping.
