How to stop data mining

[a376378]

Hi,

We are a retail website and have all of our products searchable on our website. Currently, certain external companies mine through our data daily and are able to report how much stock has been purchased and how much money the company has made. They are able to do this because there is no identical items.. So new items are easy to spot and sold items no longer appear.

We can think of many way to frustrate the data miners, but no way to stop them. We can not always identify the IP address since some come through a popular proxy (AOL etc) and even if we could, we would not block that proxy address.

We have thought about hidden fields, passing random values from one page to another etc.. but the actual click through can be simulated and the results page always generated.

Anyone have experience/ideas on how to ensure that certain pages are only displayed to real people?

Thanks.

[digicam]

How about something simple like not showing accurate stock numbers, just show that an item is in stock with a "yes", that way no one would know if something was sold?

[a376378]

We do show numbers in stock, like having 10 CD players etc.. we only have 1 of everything. Each item is an indiviual unit. When a new one shows up, we have obviously purchased the item. When the unit is gone, we have sold it.

The display of information can not change, it is a huge part of our business to have it available and accounts for a lot of $$.

[LifeinAsia]

Instead of displaying "in stock" or the number of items in stock as text, use graphics with multiple file names. Or better yet- make a dynamic graphic.

(If you don't understand what I mean, go to [google.com...] and refresh the page a few times. You'll see the graphic text above the submt button change each time.)