Category «Competitive Intelligence»

How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views

Filippo Menczer and his colleagues study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. They identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.

Subjects: AI, Competitive Intelligence, Legal Research, Search Engines, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 17, 2024

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Six highlights from this week: How to stop the government from deleting itself; Six ransomware gangs behind over 50% of 2024 attacks; Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All; The California Journalism Preservation Act takes a step forward; Microsoft Tweaks Fine Print To Warn Everyone Not To Take Its AI Seriously; Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors.

Subjects: AI, Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines

2024 Link Guide to Generative AI Resources

Marcus P. Zillman’s guide is a selective listing of open Generative AI resources that includes current awareness reports, guides, research tools, resources and applications from the open metaverse and Chat GPT. These references include AI best practices to facilitate implementing AI technology in specific sectors and within critical areas that involve engaging subject matter. expertise to deliver internal and external client and customer services. The sources are the work of AI entrepreneurs and experts, consulting groups, government, academe, the evolving global AI sector, and informative cheat sheets, prompt guides and articles published on LinkedIn.

Subjects: AI, Competitive Intelligence, Education, KM, Legal Technology, Libraries & Librarians, Search Engines

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

In 2021, a company specializing in collecting and selling location data called Near bragged that it was “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Last year the company went public with a valuation of $1 billion (via a SPAC). Seven months later it filed for bankruptcy and has agreed to sell the company. Jon Keegan highlights the ramifications to the public.

Subjects: Big Data, Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Healthcare, Information Management, Privacy

Fact Check Resources Miniguide 2024

Fact checking is a critical component to subject matter research regardless of customer, client, user sector or discipline. With the rapidity of information exchange on social media, it is increasingly important to identify and remove errors, misinformation, disinformation and untruths from any and all research that is delivered. Marcus P. Zillman’s guide includes actionable sources for professionals and students that are even more useful with the proliferation of AI as they assist researchers to validate the authority and purpose of the sources they use.

Subjects: AI, Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Internet Resources, Legal Research, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Media

The Motivation of Manipulating Data and Information to a Desired Outcome

Some recent headlines have reported disturbing news about respected and respectable scholars falsifying or just ignoring data conclusions in scholarly papers. This is another example of the skepticism many of us have with the shifts in misinformation flooding our inboxes and newsfeeds, compelling each of us to exercise our critical thinking skills. And the examples we’re referring to aren’t even results of AI. It is human error, strong bias at play, or manipulative intention for one purpose or another. This leads us to another topic in our continuing explorations of human motivation. Why do we lie? Why do we cheat? Kevin Novak takes a deeper dive on this discussion about the issues and the people and actions that have been in the news recently.

Subjects: Business Research, Communication Skills, Competitive Intelligence, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, KM, Leadership, Social Media

Schrödinger’s AI – Where Everything and Nothing Changes

Whether speaking with lawyers and law students who haven’t gotten around to trying ChatGPT or collaborating with post-doc explainable and legal AI experts with 20+ years of machine learning and Natural Language Processing experience, Colin Lachance, legal tech innovator and leader, is no closer to understanding in what way and precisely when permanent change will come, but is unshakeably convinced that change will be enormous, uneven, disruptive and, in many cases, invisible.

Subjects: AI, Competitive Intelligence, Information Management, KM, Legal Education, Legal Profession, Legal Technology, Technology Trends

We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You

If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, Investigative Data Journalist Jon Keegan and Visualizations Engineer Joel Eastwood of the The Markup analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”

Subjects: Big Data, Civil Liberties, Competitive Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Data Mining, E-Commerce, Health, Privacy

2023 Finding People MiniGuide

This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is a selected list of free and fee based (some require subscriptions), people finding resources, from a range of providers. A significant number of free sources on this subject matter are sourced from public records obtained by a group of companies who initially offer free information to establish your interest, from which point a more extensive report requires a fee to obtain. It is important to note that can be many errors in these data, including the inability to correctly de-duplicated individuals with the same common names. Also note that each service targets a different mix of identifying data such as: name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, education, employment, criminal records. social media accounts, income. As we conduct research throughout the day it is useful to employ both impromptu and planned searches about individuals that are referenced.

Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, KM, Public Records, Search Engines, Search Strategies

Your Resume: Portrait or Passport Photo? Career Development for Lawyers—And Other Ambitious People

Jerry Lawson discusses how a good resume is more like a stylish portrait photo. A top portrait photographer uses lenses, lighting, composition, props and other tools to bring out the subject’s best features in an original way. Your resume should do no less for your professional qualifications. This actionable guide clearly identifies the elements and components that comprise an outstanding resume for attorneys and other legal professionals.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Competitive Intelligence, Job Hunting, KM, Legal Profession, Search Engines, Social Media