At the Digital Money Forum last week, Kosta Peric of Swift mentioned a project at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they seek to critique data mining techniques to see how the web 'sees' you.
The results are interesting, and odd. Even though I'm a journalist, you could say my name appears fairly often online, the large amounts of genealogical data out there does dwarf any 'real' information about Elizabeth Lumley. But the point is who is the
real Elizabeth Lumley, from a digital identity perspective.
The MIT researchers make the point that "Personas is a critique of data mining. Data mining is the practice of using statistics to create meaning from large amount of data."
MIT goes onto say that data mining can be helpful, it is what makes Google work and so on. However, they add that "TSA watchlists and NSA warrantless wiretapping are the product of finding patterns of interest, and much of Wall Street is driven by so-called
'quants'"
Try it and see.