AOL searcher 4417749 exposed
Cory Bergman August 8th, 2006
So first AOL announces it’s going free, then a few days later, a few employees decide it would be cool if academic researchers could pore through the search data of 657,000 Americans. Brilliant! Of course, bloggers picked up on it, and then the media, so AOL pulled it down and apologized. But even though AOL didn’t release any names with the data — just ID numbers — that doesn’t mean that certain people, say, the New York Times can start putting some names to numbers. Enter AOL searcher 4417749, a 62-year-old widow named Thelma Arnold. “It did not take much investigating to follow (the) data trial,” reported the Times, which listed (with her permission) her searches: “numb fingers” and “60 single men” and “dog that urinates on everything.” It’s enough for one privacy rights group to call search data “a ticking privacy time bomb.” Should search companies be allowed to retain this information organized by user?
8 Comments Add your own
1. Corey Spring | August 9th, 2006 at 1:31 am
“Should search companies be allowed to retain this information organized by user?”
I don’t think they should keep it at all, but they SURE as hell shouldn’t release it to the public for anyone who wants it.
2. Everett W. | August 9th, 2006 at 6:17 am
Considering the number of people searching for illegal purposes, I suspect the question will be moot. The federal government could well force search companies to retain such information.
3. Zack | August 9th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Here’s a site someone put together to search AOL’s released search data.
4. Ron | August 9th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Search information is sitll all around the web. http://dontdelete.com has different ways to look at all of this information. Interesting but scary.
5. The Messaging Times&hellip | August 9th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
AOL in a Sticky Search Mess…
AOL EMBARRASSMENT and condemnation escalated even further today when the first person from the laundry list of search data that they published was identified and interviewed by The New York Times. Thelma Arnold (62) used AOL to search for the following…
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