[meteorite-list] Re: EBay analysis (preliminary)

From: Jamie Stephens <j.stephens_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:36 2004
Message-ID: <3F9FC627.3000301_at_morphism.com>

Mike and Ryan,

I've been in several debates before about whether aggregation
of public information is invasion of privacy. (Yes, of course
all info I obtained was publically available.) My preferred
conclusion is that some action is an invasion of privacy if
an effected person thinks it is.

Sooo I hear you. Okay.

I've gotten about 20 comments -- both on and off list -- that
were positive. I was surprised not to hear any complaints
initially.

Anyway, in the future, should I continue this work, I'll do
something like the following: I'll assign random numbers to
each EBay user, and I'll only publish those numbers. Readers
can guess who is who. There are enough sellers and bidders
that it shouldn't be terribly easy to figure out who is who.

Is that approach agreeable to you?

BTW, without authorization, robots are prohibited by EBay's User
Agreement. The primary goal of this restriction is to
protected the servers from excessive load. (My system throttled
back the page getting just so the servers wouldn't mind. My
run took four hours when instead I could have blasted requests
continuously and have been done in 10 minutes.) My intention
was (is?) to

   1. Try out some analysis to see if it was appealing. Revise.
   2. Request approval from EBay for the idea (with the slow
      drip approach I mentioned above).
   3. Revise, improve, and publish results.

Thanks for the comments. I really do want to understand what
people think about the experiment. I received several good
suggestions about other statistics to extract. I'll try to
accomodate -- even perhaps if that means cease and desist.

--Jamie

Michael Farmer wrote:

> Hi, I just saw this in Prague. I am quite offended by
> the public posting of my information. If you want to
> take the time and do that research, ok, but making it
> public here is no one's business. DO NOTY put me in
> that information again. It might even be against ebay
> policy. I will research that when I get home.
> Mike Farmer
> --- RYAN PAWELSKI <yellowengine_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>Should this be considered a true invasion of privacy
>>even if all the information that was used in the
>>analysis is available to anyone who wants to obtain
>>it? It's not like this is confidential information
>>being spewed without the persons consent. Or is it?
>>: /
>>
>>-Ryan
>>
>> [Rest deleted]
Received on Wed 29 Oct 2003 08:52:39 AM PST