Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Like Rapleaf, Flowtown extracts information from social networking sites based on email address (probably via screenscraping).
They let you enrich (customer) databases with social media information – according to this podcast interview http://web20show.com/2010/03/episode-70-flowtown-ethan-bloch/ they were "profitable from day one".

On companies datamining your social media output and social graph for marketing and even credit rating:
“I don’t think there’s anything scary about it,” she said. “Why wouldn’t they look at it? It’s public.”
Point is that lots of people are not aware that it's public… and that they are not even in control of what is public or not…

Apparently, speculation on the use of your social graph to determine your credit rating is no longer just speculation (and Rapleaf, already infamous for collating social networking profiles, is also active in this field):

"If you're [using social media] and your settings are turned to "public," who you're talking to and what you're discussing is available to those wanting to sell their wares — and that includes banks and other credit issuers."

"Rapleaf hunts and gathers social networking transmissions, turning the conversations you have in your network into consumer profiles called social graphs."

"Social graphs allow credit issuers to know if you're connected to a community of great credit customers. Creditors can see if people in your network have accounts with them, and are free to look at how they are handling those accounts. "

Digg-like CakePHP community/knowledgebase site.

2007 comparison of CodeIgniter and CakePHP.
Apart from documentation, CakePHP seems to come out best.

(Prank) Service exploiting the browserhistory privacy flaw.
Send a shortlink to a friend and wait for the "naughty sites" to show up he or she visits (their browser history is being checked against a precompiled list of popular porn/sex dating sites).

Targeting service exploiting the browserhistory privacy flaw.
Embed the javascript in your website that checks your visitor's browser history against a list you defined. Typically a list of competitors, so you could offer discounts to people who have been visiting several competitor websites.
(BTW browsers should make it impossible to send back browser history info to the server but it is technically hard to implement this…)

"The [browser history] loophole basically lets you see where else your visitors have been on the Internet. Well, it’s now out in the open, in two forms: Beencounter, and Haveyourfriendsbeenthere.

To be perfectly clear, the site won’t show you everything your visitors surf–just whether or not they’ve been to a set of sites you define."

The story (on the data Dubai police released about the assassin team that killed a Hamas official) is interesting because it demonstrates the impact of CCTV and biometric passports.

"the company ClearSight Interactive is getting ready to launch a form of targeting based on users' IP addresses. ClearSight, which describes IP addresses as the bridge between users' offline and online data, has spent the last 18 months acquiring more than 100 million IP addresses — along with email addresses and postal addresses — from publishers"

Bruce Schneier tackling camera surveillance in an oped on CNN.com

"Pervasive security cameras don't substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact."

Bruce Schneier tackling camera surveillance in an oped on CNN.com

"Pervasive security cameras don't substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact."