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...