Last.fm Datamining
Categories: [ IT ]
Interesting article about how personal profiles on different systems can be linked together by datamining:
“If your username isn't your real name, your Last.fm account may seem to be anonymous, but the facts it contains probably tell the world who you are.”
“even a small amount of information about other pseudonyms you've friended on Last.fm has a high probability of allowing a data miner to match you based on the friendship graphs from other sites”
“There are only 7 billion people on the planet, and only about a billion on the Internet. Every fact about a person (are they male or female? Where they live? Do they listen to Brian Eno?) slices that number down by a significant fraction. If you have enough facts about a person, (33 bits of independent facts, it turns out, because log2 7,000,000,000 = 32.7) you can determine who they are.”