Latin American Zeitgeist consultant emeritus
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AOL: All Our Searches Are Belong to You
Posted by Colin Brayton on August 8, 2006
AOL Releases Web-Search Data Of 650,000 Users (W$J): And it’s sitting right here on my hard drive, waiting for me to try out my data-mining tools on it.
AOL Inc., in a move that raised online-privacy concerns, said it mistakenly released data about the Web-search habits of more than 650,000 AOL members.
The AOL users weren’t personally identified in the data and instead were tracked by anonymous user-ID numbers. However, numbers would still allow everyone from law enforcement to identity thieves to analyze an individual’s searches — which could involve names, addresses and other subjects that could provide hints to the individual’s identities.
Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for the Time Warner Inc. unit, acknowledged that “search queries themselves can sometimes include such information” and called the release “a screw-up.”AOL researchers posted the data, which detailed more than 20 million queries made by the users between March 1 and May 31, without authorization, to a new AOL research Web site about 10 days ago.
The document was for use by other search-technology researchers, but was noticed by bloggers in the search-marketing field late Sunday. Their discovery set off a flurry of blog postings and apparently led to hundreds of downloads of the data. AOL said it immediately pulled the data off its site Sunday when it realized what had happened.
This is just the sort of data that the Dept. of Justice wanted to obtain from Google and the other search mechanics, remember.
NMM Business Continuity » Blog Archive » Uncle Sam Wants Your Kashmiri Query said
[...] Google Fears Government Snooping More Than AOL-Like Blunder (Technology News): Eric Schmidt is out highlighting precisely the message I sketched out the other day — the government wants to turn the search industry into the IG Farben of personal data. Google, of course, has already tangled with the government in at least one instance of which the public is aware. Earlier this year, Google went to court to squash a subpoena from the Department of Justice requesting a sample of search term queries over a certain period of time. The DoJ had asked for, and apparently received, similar data from other search providers including Yahoo, AOL and MSN. [...]