AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data

[Blodrast]

The summary: 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users.
The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period this year.
While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/

You can also find this already in a LOT of other places, there's (understandably) a lot of buzz about this. You can also download the data yourselves, although I'm not gonna provide a link to it.

AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein released an official apology, it appears on several blogs and in the general press.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/#comment-126507


I guess this reinforces two things:
1. if it's online, it's not safe (or private).
2. how much AOL really cares about its customers.


edit: My bad, I see that Lemur already posted this in the backroom. Feel free to lock it and/or delete it. I wasn't sure whether this belonged in there or in here either :D

[Lemur]

You went for the imformative, I went for the amusing. The threads should probably be merged in the Backroom.

[Beirut]

If anyone has any tech-comments they would like to make on the issue, they may do so.

[Blodrast]

In my opinion, the amount of data released, while apparently impressive if one looks at the raw numbers, is probably not much compared to what Google sees.

I guess it is pretty much a reality check kind of thing, in the sense that probably not everybody was aware that there is very little privacy on the internet.

I have a kind-of technical question, though: what exactly determines _so many_ people to become customers of AOL ? I have never heard one good thing about them, but plenty of bad stuff.
I've also experienced it first hand - my aunt used to have them for an ISP some 12 years ago, and it was a horrible experience for my young fragile brain.
So, what exactly do they offer that makes people want to use them ?


Back on topic: I've downloaded the data myself, and I'll probably play with it a little to see what useful little trinkets of information one can extract. But I won't put too much time/effort into it, and I'd like to see some statistics by professionals on this data - which I'm sure will be worked on, but probably not published.

One would think this would indeed make good material for a research paper - which allegedly is what AOL originally intended to use the data for - releasing it to the research community...