dan mcquillan's List: social computing IS52026B - lecture 11

• GPs at a health centre in York have written to patients saying the NHS will no longer fund minor operations and instead offering to carry out the procedures for a fee,

• It says: "We are holding your details on a list of patients who require a minor surgical procedure that is no longer paid for by the NHS."

  The letter identifies four "local service providers who offer the procedure privately", including HBG Ltd, which it admits is "a company that is wholly owned by the practice".
• "This is a massive conflict of interest here. The GP is earning money potentially from referring the NHS patient to his own private practice," John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund, said.

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• At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its "Mood" discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

   

  It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was "scraping," or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe's private online forums.
• PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.
• California has a special protection for public officials, including politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys. It makes it easier for them to remove their home address and phone numbers from these databases, by filling out a special form stating they fear for their safety.
• "Social networks are becoming the new public records," says Jim Adler, chief privacy officer of Intelius Inc., a leading paid people-search website. It offers services that include criminal background checks and "Date Check," which promises details about a prospective date for $14.95.
• New York-based PeekYou LLC has applied for a patent for a method that, among other things, matches people's real names to the pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and other social networks. PeekYou's people-search website offers records of about 250 million people, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.
• At Monster.com, the jobs website that stores résumés for tens of millions of individuals, fighting scrapers is a full-time job, "every minute of every day of every week," says Patrick Manzo, global chief privacy officer of Monster Worldwide Inc.
• The Nielsen unit that did the scraping is now part of a joint venture with McKinsey & Co. called NM Incite. It traces its roots to a Cincinnati company called Intelliseek that was founded in 1997. One of its most successful early businesses was scraping message boards to find mentions of brand names for corporate clients.
• In 2001, the venture-capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel Inc., was among a group of investors that put $8 million into the business.

• In 2006, Nielsen bought Intelliseek, which had revenue of more than $10 million and had just become profitable, Mr. Kadayam says. He left one year after the acquisition.

   

  At the time, Nielsen, which provides television ratings and other media services, was looking to diversify into digital businesses. Nielsen combined Intelliseek with a New York startup it had bought called BuzzMetrics.

   

  The new unit, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, quickly became a leader in the field of social-media monitoring. It collects data from 130 million blogs, 8,000 message boards, Twitter and social networks. It sells services such as "ThreatTracker," which alerts a company if its brand is being discussed in a negative light. Clients include more than a dozen of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, according to the company's marketing material.

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