[lit-ideas] Pharma Spies
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 01:07:09 EDT
Hi,
This is from the blog from the bioethics.net site...as we have discussed Big
Pharma in the past, I thought it relevant. I suppose there will be even
more people monitoring Our List.
I had not heard of "i-reputation" ... is it a data-mining software of some
sort?
Wondering what sort of pay a Pharma Spy gets,
Marlena (usually in Missouri)
Bloggers: Be Afraid [of Pharma Spies] - Be Very Afraid
Financial Times reports that leading pharmaceutical companies have figured
out how to "'spy' on internet conversations about medicines, and they are going
to be reading blogs. Already our server logs record dozens of hits a day
from pharma companies (hey, works for me - read bioethics all day long,
guys!),
but the new software, called "i-reputation," is on a whole new scale, raising
the ire of lots of folks in the Internet community. Tough to see why
pharmaceutical folks reading blogs would be problematic, since after all blogs
are
public, but it is easy to see what the concentrated strength of
pharmaceutical companies could do to suppress something that Big Pharma doesn't
want to
see in blogdom.
Health bloggers have the capacity right now to operate under the radar screen
of big corporations, or at least to do so to some degree, because the
readership is a small and dedicated sampling of people who cannot get enough
news,
or who are looking for very specific information from Google (that latter
group makes up roughly 75% of our readership, for example). But blogdom
germinates ideas that eventually become threatening to powerful corporations
and
others with clout - and so the same technology that made blogs so accessible
will
now be reverse engineered to make blogs more vulnerable...
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