Legal Research

Tracking the Web, and Monetizing Off It

By Omar Ha-Redeye

Yesterday, Nicole Baute of the Toronto Star covered a new social networking analysis company, Sysomos.  The Canadian company gathers data from Twitter, Facebook, and 30 million blogs.  Yes, 30 million.

It’s a new start-up by a UofT prof and one of his grad students, and they received financial support from the province to get things going.

They claim to go beyond brand monitoring by identifying what people are saying, who these people are, and what their tone is.

One recent practical application is mentions of Steven Harper when parliament was prorogued.  They also say it could be used for crisis communications, such as the recent Maple Leaf scare.

Privacy concerns are also raised by one marketing professor,

I’m no lawyer, but my general sense here is that there’ll be some noise in the system (from privacy advocates) about this. I think it’s user beware, and if you choose to blog, you’re putting stuff out into the public sphere.

I’m no lawyer either, but I would agree that if the information they are collecting is made publicly available by the user and only analyzed in the aggregate, there is little room to complain.

But the expertise is obviously greater here among the contributors and readers, so what do you think about this?

As for ads that watch you through a hidden video camera and use facial-recognition software, that’s a totally different issue.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 01, 2009 (boomark / email).