Cisco rolls out social network monitoring software

[SecularMotion]

Source: Network World

Cisco this week unveiled software designed to let companies track customers and prospects on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other public forums and sites.

Facebook is fastest social network, LinkedIn most reliable

Cisco SocialMiner allows users to monitor status updates, forum posts and blogs of customers so they can be alerted of conversations related to their brand. The software is designed to not only enable enterprises to monitor the conversations of their customers but to engage those that require service, Cisco says.

Citing data from Nielsen, Cisco says 34% of online Americans have used Facebook, Twitter or other social media to "rant or rave" about a product, company or brand.

Read more: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/110310-cisco-social-network-software.html?hpg1=bn

[Bette Noir]

1. Nifty. Now corporations get to spy on us.

[Billy Burnett]

3. Everything one posts on Twitter is already out in the open.

You can't expect privacy on open social networks.

You can do just about the same thing as OP topic here ...

www.twitpipe.com

Just insert your search terms into the search boxes and all tweets containing your terms will stream in real time.


BTW, DU's tag = demund

[Roland99]

7. only if one chooses to participate

Timothy Leary was more right than many want to admit, perhaps. :)

[Wednesdays]

15. I was about to say...

Almost everyone I know offline has either a Facebook or Twitter account. I refused all along for privacy reasons...long before this new development.

[Bragi]

20. Me too

I'm sixty, part of a generation that still cared about old-fashioned things like personal privacy.

What I find sad is that young people have been encouraged to jump onto and use these social media platforms without giving personal privacy any thought whatsoever.

[SugarShack]

34. Yes, and Im taking my page down because THEY put on MY page

at the bottome it says: "Xxxxxx likes Organic Valley Half & Half"...I did not post this on my page...they got it from my grocery shopping bill....and they know exactly where and what I spend our money on. Makes me sick..and I will take my page down.

[Bragi]

37. That IS creepy, but is now SOP

I think you made a good decision to take down your page.

[Naipes]

49. Take page down or Delete Account?

Just in case you, or anyone else, did not know, there is more to deleting a Facebook account than just deactivating it.

The following link explains how to permanently delete your facebook account.

http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account

[JackRiddler]

59. Can you opt out of credit scores?

No.

Phone bills?

Sure! No absolute need for phones, right?

[Roland99]

61. One can live on a cash basis. Plenty of people well past college age w/no credit file.

[snot]

39. NOTE: Gummints et al. could also use this.

[JackRiddler]

60. It's very likely that gummints et al. developed the base for this and Cisco is commercializing it.

[JackRiddler]

58. They've been doing that for a million years. Cisco is extending it to small businesses.

[newspeak]

64. actually, I think the government has already privatized part

of our intelligence--which to me, is kind of disturbing. It's just that many large corporations have subsidiaries, other interests and many have foreign interests. If you had other interests, and let's say starting a disturbance would help your corporation, would you do it for profit, instead of country? I think some things should not be privatized-gathering intelligence and security should be 100% governmental.

[msongs]

2. more change you can believe in nt

[xor]

11. Clearly President Obama shouldn't have created this product/service.

What a jerk he is. :P

[Wednesdays]

16. Yeah, I mean...WTF?

:wtf:

[KamaAina]

65. We do have this sarcasm thingie

:sarcasm: (type a colon, then the word sarcasm, then another colon) that's perfect for posts like that.

[xor]

66. Figured it was too obvious to warrant any such thing...

I've also never been much of a fan of non-basic emoticons. I find them similar to things like 'ROTFLMAO'. What ever happened to just simple LOL or even a "hahaha"?

[madmax]

4. I put on my tinfoil hat and sent this to all my friends.

Not because I'm concerned that Colgate wants to know what toothpaste I use but, what if, lol - yeah right - the GOV is using some type of software to 'mine' other data. Our emails, our internet searches. Net searches I think my son said they are already doing.

I'm going to need a larger :tinfoilhat:

[Wednesdays]

19. Do you think that if the government was in on it, they'd publicize it like this?

:shrug:

Having said that, your tinfoil hat-donning is not unfounded. I'm sure the government is capable of going FAR beyond what's described in the OP. Keep in mind that the military has always been 10 years ahead of the general public regarding electronic technology.

[madmax]

50. Yes, I think I do

hide in plain sight. For the most part Americans are naive about the powers behind the flags, slogans, monuments - the symbolism of pictures like Iwo Jima. Yeah, I do. ;)

[Occulus]

62. Employers already do this.

No tinfoil required. It's already policy for many businesses, and there have been posts on DU in the past relating stories in the media of people getting fired for things they say on boards and whatnot.

[Lance_Boyle]

5. I welcome this as a tool to thwart usage of these viral vectors on my clients. n/t

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[snooper2]

8. That is SOOOOOOOO dungeon worthy!

nt

[Bragi]

9. Agreed, except...

Except I can't decide if there may be some truth to it.

Thing is, if a bunch of spooks with unlimited money were sitting around trying to figure out how you could get people in a society with privacy laws to publish personal information about who and where they are, their backgrounds, their family connections, what they are doing with their lives, their political views, who they hang out with, what organizations they belong to/support, etc. etc. then I think they'd eventually come up with something that looked like Facebook.

What holds me back from believing this is that I don't think spooks are smart enough to figure that out, or to implement it if they did figure it out.

However, that spooks and law enforcement use Facebook to track people, I have no doubt. Nor do I have much doubt that some future nasty government will use these tools to track down people they don't like.

[Hestia]

12. Another tool also I can see the spooks using is Ancestry.com

Everybody is already doing the work for them, figuring out who's related to whom. If an 8th cousin 17 times removed commits a crime, they are still family, right? :sarcasm: We've (society) has essentially done all the work regarding our social & familial relationships, to such a point that cops are using it.

[Bragi]

14. The quaint notion of personal privacy is hilarious, isn't it?

I mean what could possibly go wrong with putting all our personal information, political views and social connections online?

[snot]

35. Exactly--the "Cloud" is rapidly transforming the net into a top-down surveillance system,

with US doing most of the work for them.

See http://c-cyte.blogspot.com/2007/10/control-over-internet-is-underway-all_03.html .

The oligarchs basically unveiled their plans in Forbes in May, 2007: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/156.html (and possibly elsewhere; but that's when I first realized what was going on).

However, I do NOT accept that resistance if futile; on the contrary, I think we should do all we can to make it as difficult for them as possible.

[xor]

10. Oh I wonder if they'll have a Cisco Certified Spy Professional certficiation...

Hmmm CCSP... well that won't work.

[no limit]

13. You do know that if you go to facebook at work they can already track all this right?

Cisco just made it easier for them to do so.

Moral of the story: Don't use social networking at work, and if you do don't say something that might get you fired.

[snot]

18. Yeah, and don't use it for political organizing, either.

[no limit]

21. What's wrong for using it for political organizing outside of work?

Is your political organizing meant to be super secret?

[Bragi]

22. Depends

If you're 15 years old and organizing for, say, the Socialist Workers Party, do you suppose a future employer 10 years later may decide to choose someone else who is, say, friends with their local GOP organization?

[no limit]

25. That's more of an issue with social networking in general, not using it for political organizing

anything you post online with your name can and probably will be used against you at some point in your life. If you're worried about that the best thing you can do is not use these services at all.

[Bragi]

26. Agreed /eom

[snot]

36. Like, if you organize a protest, would you like to be pre-emptively jailed

the way protesters have been during recent RNC's and the like (rounded up and detained before your protest can happen)?

[no limit]

42. Hard to organize a protest if nobody knows about it.

[Bragi]

43. Can't organize without Facebook? Really?

[no limit]

46. That's not what I said. I'm saying you would think it you want to set up a protest

the more people exposed to it the better.

[ProudDad]

67. Actually, setting up a "protest" on Facebook

just adds to the noise level...

[snot]

45. Yup. But before the internet, people managed it.

[no limit]

47. I didn't say you can't get it done without the internet. But the internet is the best promotion you

have. And if you are promoting it different ways the cops still have access to that information if the information is public.

[snot]

48. Agreed. But I think people underestimate the good they can do simply by

not making it so easy for Big Brothers.

[Bragi]

52. Fair enough

But I think we actually need to promote anonymous Internet access as a basic human right, one that flows logically from the right to free thought and expression. Even, as you point out, the right to assemble is facilitated using social media. We need to stop treating it like private property, and start using it more as a commons.

[no limit]

54. There is no such thing as anonymous internet access. The packets have to be sent somewhere

that somewhere is you. And as they get to you they pass through hundreds of different servers and other nodes. Nothing you can do to change that, this is how the internet works.

[Bragi]

55. Interesting way to look at it

I agree that there is no technical way to be anonymous on the Internet.

However, would I not be anonymous if I found someone in the middle of the transaction with a server who is prepared to accept and send packets on my behalf, and whom I trust will not allow anyone else to know who I am when I connect to send or receive packets?

[no limit]

56. You would be more anonymous, sure. But that's based on a lot of assumptions

the first assumption is the person that you trust is actually truly trust worthy. Which is a very dangerous assumption to make. Your browser will also leave traces, if you are really anal you can put in a lot of work to configure your browser to not leave these traces, problem with that is it will make many of the sites you might like to use unusable.

[Bragi]

57. These guys I trust

These guys couldn't stand up like WikiLeaks, but I have every reason to think they do what they claim to do.

http://www.cotse.net/index.html

[Wednesdays]

23. Don't use social networking, period. Except in real life.

I've read many times that ANYTHING you post on the Internet, even if it's supposedly "locked" behind a password, is comparable to tacking a written message on a public bulletin board. And it can be read by people forever.

(That includes this message, LOL. Hi, Agent Mike!) :hi:

So, if there's something you don't want certain eyes to read or see, keep it off the Internet.

[leveymg]

17. This is an issue with HTML5 that Facebook uses for some features.

There’s been plenty of worry over the years about Internet privacy, “but the alarmists have not seen anything yet,” warns the New York Times in a front-page story on the dangers of HTML5. The new web standards will bring tons of new features—“It’s going to change everything … it’s the new web,” gushes one web developer—but it will also make surfer’s computers much more vulnerable to trackers.

HTML5 allows large amounts of data to be collected and stored on a user’s hard drive while they’re online—kind of like cookies on steroids. As a result, advertisers may be able to see weeks or months worth of data, including emails, web history, address, shopping cart items and more. It “gives trackers one more bucket to put tracking information into,” says the CTO for the Opera browser, while a privacy advocate frets that the standard “opens Pandora’s box of tracking in the Internet.”

P.S. - Facebook already uses HTML5 components, and someone has cooked up a supercookie that's floating around on the Net.

Facebook, see: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/usin...

Samy "Samy Worm" Kamkar's HTML5 Supercookie, see: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/daily_news/article.php/41339...

[Bragi]

24. How can we stay anonymous with HTML 5?

Can we just shut down HTML 5 components, or is that not an option? (Serious question.)

[no limit]

29. Nothing you do on the internet makes you totally anonymous. Nothing new in HTML5

that hasn't already been around for ages. Yes, there are some more "exploits" that people can use in HTML5 but compared to what's already out there they are insignificant.

[Bragi]

31. Not quite so

See https://www.anonymousspeech.com/Default.aspx

That service, and others like it, offer pretty good protection.

[no limit]

33. Your IP address is not the only way of identifying you.

Plus with a crappy no name service like that all your are doing is putting your privacy in the hands of a no name company. Not a very good idea.

[enlightenment]

38. I've been told that it is possible, but

it can cause real problems with places you WANT to visit.

I use NoScript in Firefox, which seems to help - at least I can easily block crap scripts loaded in pages that I wouldn't 'see' otherwise.

http://download.cnet.com/NoScript/3000-11745_4-10461464.html

[no limit]

27. The idea that the so called "super cookie" is new to HTML5 is absolutely false

Most of the methods used for this "super cookie" have been around since the 90s.

I personally think people worry too much. Cookies aren't as dangerous as people make them out to be.

[snot]

41. YOUR LINKS

The first article linked to doesn't seem to be there.
The the second article won't let me see it without placing cookies on my computer.
Got a link to the NYT article cited?

Thanks!

[leveymg]

51. Here are those links. They got chopped, my apologies.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-html5-today/438532093919
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/daily_news/article.php/413396/HTML-5-Technology-May-Have-Privacy-Issues.htm
http://www.newser.com/story/102683/html5-who-needs-privacy.html - The NYT article referenced is behind a pay screen (I don't subscribe).

[snot]

53. THANKS! I'll try to put these to good use.

[NashVegas]

28. Remember How We Freaked Out When John Poindexter Wanted TIA?

Yet we give it all away to Rupert, Mark et al.

[Bragi]

30. TIA allegedly morphed into Facebook

That's the conspiracy theory, anyway.

(See as above: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12685)

But what matters to me isn't whether this initial conspiracy happened, it is that social media has evolved into a dream-come-true tool for building a repressive, totalitarian state.

Not that that could happen, of course.

[NashVegas]

63. Social Media Creates Pressure to Conform or Be An Outcast

Imagine last year, when everyone had a green-tinted avatar for Neda. How well would it have gone over to suggest maybe we shouldn't be sending the CIA over there and funneling dollars to create the rally that put her in the streets?

[canoeist52]

32. I think large corporations actually fear social networking sites

like Facebook and Twitter. Boycotts can spread like wildfire on these sites causing great damage to them. They'd like us to be afraid of the internet.

The info. mining is them just wanting a piece what action is out there.

[Bragi]

40. They'll eventually fix this for the corps

A great way to stop boycotts would be to sue boycott leaders for libel and slander.

I'm sure Facebook will be happy to sell the information needed for corporations to identify the ringleaders.

That would eventually put a stop to using the Internet in this corp-unfriendly way.

[woo me with science]

44. I made the mistake of downloading Cisco's "Network Magic" program.

Then I decided I didn't want it, but it would not completely uninstall from the computer. A particular file kept accessing the internet even though the program was supposedly uninstalled.

I called and was connected to an representative who was probably in India. He told me that the only way he could help me remove it was for me to allow him remote access to my desktop. I told him no way. He refused to help otherwise, so I hung up.

I figured out that I could delete the offending file in safe mode, but it still made me angry.

This was Cisco.

[harvey007]

68. Another reason NOT to use Facebook and Twitter

http://lifehacker.com/5538697/how-to-quit-facebook-without-actually-quitting-facebook

http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook