What do Dataminers Accomplish and..

[Louis]

Common sense makes me think that I know about Dataminers.
However my knowledgebase tells me, "You knnow nothing
about dataminers".
So I will ask the following before strolling on the
internet highway.
(a) What do Dataminers Accomplish
(b) What group specifically without permission plants
this program.

Louis.

 

[Engel]

A software application that monitors and/or analyzes the
activities of a computer, and subsequently its user, of
the purpose of collecting information that typically will
be used for marketing purposes. The two most common forms
of data miners are data mining programs that an
organization uses to analyze its own data to look for
significant patterns, and spyware programs that are
uploaded to a user's computer to monitor the user's
activity and send the data back to the organization,
typically so that the organization can send the user
targeted advertising.

 

[Guest]

The portion that I do not appreciate is
"Searching for household income, predicting credit card
balance transfer average amount, also affinity grouping".
Who are they trying to fool! "Predicting?" they are not
predicting, they are searching for your credit card
number, and any other information that tickels their sick
mind with their "Description and Profiling".

Microsoft's antispyware program should locate the
dataminer intrusion of privacy program and allow us to
send a message to the intruder. Their antispyware program
sales figures would escalate through the stratosphere.

Louis.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Dataminers, in terms of items not scanned for or cleaned by Microsoft
Antispyware are cookies--text files that reside on your computer. They are
there with your permission--because you have the ability, through settings
in Internet Explorer, to regulate, in some broad ways, what cookies are
allowed to be placed on your machine.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cookie.htm

is a pretty good set of basic reference material.

Here's an article specifically about cookies as data miners:

http://www.pcanswers.co.uk/tutorial...id=36703&subsectionid=780&subsubsectionid=739

Please be clear--it is these cookies that we are talking about here, and not
executable code on your machine capturing personal information---that code
is clearly something Microsoft Antispyware should be finding now.

Last I heard, the debate about whether or not Microsoft Antispyware should
scan for and selectively remove cookes was not closed. Program management
has said that this capability might appear in a later build of the beta.