Standard Mischief

Wow, what a screw up. I?m not a 100% sure what?s going on here, but AOL seems to have made a bunch of search queries available on a public website, then yanked the page. Screenshot of the AOL page is here.

Maybe I’m missing something major, but this seems exactly like the case where the Department of Justice asked Google for a bunch of search data in their attempt to resurrect a law that was struck down, except this time it was AOL, not Google, and the data was released world wide instead of being sent to the DOJ.

I have no idea why AOL compiled the data in the first place, but obviously they made a mistake by releasing it.

So here’s the thread I’ll be quoting from. This whole thingy was brought to my attention by Acidus.

by skullaria:

Aol released TONS of user information in the form of search engine queries, and whether or not links were clicked on.

While they did obliterate the name, replacing it with a number, anyone that has egosurfed is clearly at risk..

Emphasis is mine.

by Rattle:

Update: I’ve imported the data into an SQL database so I can do some data mining. It’s about 3.5G worth of SQL, so the process of building indexes and performing any useful queries is really slow going. Sometime in the next 24 hours, I should be posting up some statistics. I have to think about it some more first… From what I’ve gathered so far, there is no liability in doing so.

AOL fucked up. This data is in the hands of many, many, many people. That being the case, I want to see how the data frames the issues we all have with this kind of data being available to law enforcement, marketers, and others.. Anyone who has any ideas about what questions we should be asking, reply to this with your thoughts.

Here’s a list of mirrors for the data.

by Decius:

This will probably be a watershed moment for Internet privacy.

Unfortunately, we?ve been having too many watershed moments lately. Recent thefts of laptops containing unencrypted, private information that was being held by government subcontractors barely caused a ripple.

Update: An apology by AOL, in part, from The Paradigm Shift blog:

This was a screw up, and we?re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Translation: We meant to do this, but at the time we didn’t consider how the public would perceive it. The backlash stings, I tell you. If our left hand knew what the right hand was doing, we would have never done this.

“…We?ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again….”

Translation: Someone’s going to get fired.