In one embodiment, an Internet eco system includes a data posting platform securely accessible over the Internet to post personal, confidential and business data for conducting informational and transactional transactions for compensation. In another embodiment, the Internet eco system enables data providers to earn monetary compensation, system credits compensation or barter based compensation. In another embodiment, the Internet eco system enables data posting based upon freeform, system forms, keywords, mathematical logic, constraints, policies, facts, rules, workflow, or context logic; such data can be searched and retrieved based upon keywords, mathematical logic, constraints, policies, facts, rules, workflow, or context based search criteria. In yet another embodiment, the Internet eco system provides methods for authentication, authorization, accounting, data indexing, data classification, heuristics, activity metering, fraud detection and prevention, user identification, verification and dispute resolution, providing feedback, payments and systems credit settlement, providing virtual agent capabilities and third party interfacing capabilities and for providing interfaces to search logic. In yet another embodiment of the Internet eco system provides methods for data providers and data consumers to engage in and to consummate social networking based transactions.