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...r-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...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