-Caveat Lector-
Concern About New Web Monitors
<http://www.wired.com/news/business/0%2C1367%2C41931%2C00.html?tw=wn20010224>
by Aparna Kumar
Feb. 24, 2001
A good rumor will always have a life of its own. But on the Web, even the
dimmest one can grow quicker, uglier and more embarrassing than a zit on a
teenager's forehead.
Indeed, by the time a company catches wind of some dirty laundry airing on
Fucked Company's message boards or Vault's online water cooler, it's often
too late to deploy the PR troops.
But thanks to the increasing sophistication of
data-extraction technology offered by a host of Web intelligence agencies,
corporate PR is sharpening its surgical-strike capability: the power to
extinguish a rumor as soon as it's born.
Although the business of corporate "cybersleuthing" smacks of big brother,
there's nothing illegal about companies monitoring public exchange on the
Internet. Companies and individuals, for that matter, have been free to do
that all along. What concerns privacy advocates, however, is whether
corporations will use the new monitoring technology to suppress legitimate
online dissent.
"Conceptually speaking, cybersleuthing is nothing new," said Stanton
MacCandlish, technical directorate of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
privacy watchdog organization. "It's an outgrowth of something companies
have been doing forever. What's troubling is what companies are going to do
with this information now that they have it at their fingertips."
Among the companies capitalizing on corporate paranoia is a fleet of Web
clipping services that are parlaying their information gathering
capabilities into cybersleuthing tools, which function as automated
rumor-trackers. CyberScan, CyberAlert and eWatch are among the companies
that comb the Web to report what's being said about their clients in all
the public and not-so-public corners of the Internet, from online news
outlets to Usenet groups, Web logs and e-mail listservs.
At the forefront of the cybersleuthing industry, some companies, such as
online-news trawler Moreover and the "Internet intelligence agency"
NetCurrents, offer their clients real-time Web monitoring.
"Moreover sees cybersleuthing in the same continuum as headline news
delivery," a company spokesman said. "Though we don't offer to track down
the authors of postings, take action, mobilize evangelists or read moods of
boards, because of the power of the dynamic database, Moreover could be a
great partner to a cyber bounty-hunter."
Unlike more traditional search engines, which spider through the Web at
regular intervals and index all the content they come across, Moreover
captures dynamic information from a smaller pool of sources to provide its
clients with relevant and up-to-the-minute results. Whereas search engines
such as Google say they sweep the Web every two weeks, Moreover uses an
XML-harvesting technology to index some 2200 selected online sources every
15 minutes.
With Moreover's technology, a rumor posted online will show up on the
company's radar within 15 minutes of being posted. Short of installing a
human "mole" on high-profile sites twenty-four hours a day, seven days a
week, that's as close as a company can get to having eyes and ears
everywhere on the Web.
Although Moreover does not currently track chat-room discussions, it does
index closed discussion boards those requiring a password and cookie
permission for entryon a case-by-case basis. Clients need to have the
correct password to access the full message. "If it has a URL, it can be
extracted by our techniques," Moreover CEO Nick Denton said.
As companies pay more attention to what's circulating on the online
grapevine, privacy experts say Web surfers need to be more aware of the
fact that public forums on the Internet may be more susceptible to scrutiny
and prosecution than offline discussions.
"Too many people consider online conversations like typed phone calls,"
said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.
"Different states have laws that regulate the monitoring and recording of
phone calls, but those laws don't apply in cyberspace. People have to
realize that when they're participating in a chat room or in an online
discussion group, they're speaking to a public universe with a very long
memory. Anybody could be recording what they say."
Privacy advocates point to a number of instances in which companies have
attempted to force ISPs to reveal the identities of anonymous posters. But
so far, there's no precedent to determine when and under which
circumstances ISPs must disclose user information.
"The problem is these types of cases are dealt with on an ad hoc basis by
both the courts and by ISPs," Weinstein said. "For something as sensitive
as protecting people's privacy and free speech, there needs to be a due
process."
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