All your posting does not belong to you/ 'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web

[DainBramaged]

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.

"I felt totally violated," says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703358504575544381288117888.html

[MidwestRick]

1. My ezine is just a few weeks old...

but I have found this site http://www.copyscape.com/ very useful in looking up plagiarism. I have already sent messages to a couple of other bloggers asking them to either credit me to the article they stole, or to remove it. So far in both instances they wrote back and apologized and with in an hour, they had edited the story with my credits included.

-MR

[MidwestRick]

2. My ezine is just a few weeks old...

double post...sorry.

[Curmudgeoness]

3. Nothing is sacred anymore. And this is really low on the part of Nielsen.

But I also do not expect much privacy from anything that I do on the internet. Still, this is lower than a snake's ass. Don't do the real work, just cheat off someone else.

[Xipe Totec]

4. I'm going to post some keywords now

incontinence, menopause, muscular dystrophy.

There.

I should have spam mail on one of thes subjects in about a day or so.

[DainBramaged]

5. You forgot penile insignificance.....

:rofl:

[Xipe Totec]

6. Now YOU will be getting some spam

:evilgrin:

[DainBramaged]

8. Not me oh no.....I live in a cardboard box, they don't want to target me....

:hi:

[Xipe Totec]

9. Spam about investing in cardboard housing realestate

:evilgrin:

[Naturyl]

7. You can't get too personal online.

Everything you post is for sale, and can be used against you. That's just the fact of it.

[MrScorpio]

10. This is happening to DU at this very moment

There are others on the Net who are cataloguing all of our posts as an effort to discredit and attack us.

I've seen it with my own eyes.

[DainBramaged]

11. Nothing you see here is real...........