AOL: About Our Lives

The NY Times reveals the internet searches of an AOL user Thelma Arnold, in A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. How could they, you might well ask?

Dan Rubin at Bling sums it up at You've Got Company:

AOL hadn't identified her. Not by name. She was just listed as AOL user number 4417749 when the Internet provider released 20 million Web search queries that 657,000 of its customers had typed over a three-month period.

But she wasn't too hard to find. Her searches showed she was looking for people with her last name, landscapers in her town and information about properties sold in her subdivision.

And when the reporter called and read to her what user No 4417749 was looking for, she acknowledged she was the woman who researches friends' medical issues and cares for three dogs. "Those are my searches."

AOL has apologized and pulled the search data. But the information had already been duplicated countless times of the Web.

The Internet is abuzz with criticism of the company and questions about who is keeping track of us and how much we reveal about ourselves without our knowledge. The executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in D.C. called the consequences of this seemingly innocent data collection "a ticking privacy time bomb."

French bloggers are called it "la gaffe d'Aol." The Times of London find it "a disturbingly intimate picture of some of AOL's user base.

Gee, if someone checked my searches, they might get the idea that I didn't like George Bush and the Republican Party.

As the Times article noted:

But the unintended consequences of all that data being compiled, stored and cross-linked are what Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington, called “a ticking privacy time bomb.”

In AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data, Techcrunch adds:

The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. 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.

The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless.

I knew there was a good reason that I hated AOL -- besides the fact that its email program is the worst and its interface is made for idiots. Between the government spying on us and AOL posting our searches, I believe that we've lost all vestiges of privacy.

UPDATE: Slate has the search history of another AOL User, Slate discovers another AOL search record. See if you can guess who it is.

Tags: News, AOL, Privacy