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The Face of One AOL Searcher Exposed
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from "numb fingers" to "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything., report NYT journalists Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller Jr., but with a permission from Mrs. Thelma Arnold, 62. "Those are my searches," she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her, continues the article."
Asked about Ms. Arnold, an AOL spokesman, Andrew Weinstein, reiterated the companys position that the data release was a mistake. We apologize specifically to her, he said. There is not a whole lot we can do.
What a load... there is plenty you can do AOL. You can promise not to release this data again, you can actively hunt for it on the web. You can promise to delete your copy. You can promise that you won't keep data like this anymore. You can implement better security policies so that you know where your data is, and what is hapenning with it. You can limit the people who have access to posting stuff on your website.
Useless bastards!
I guess this just goes to show that you should be using something like Torpark even when merely conducting an online search.
:)
Whilest protecting your privacy does, on the surface, seem like a good thing, I wonder if it might count against you if you were ever suspected of a crime. We've already seen 'he has some encrypted data' used as evidence (even though the contents of the encrypted file weren't known) in one successful conviction, I suspect 'he's using privacy protection software called Tor' may go down the same way.
Remember, only people who have something to hide care about protecting their privacy.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
At the very least do your searching through an engine that is separate to your ISP.
A customer of AOL searching through AOL has their searches linked to you as an individual. If you search through google then they get your IP address, and your ISP knows which IP address links to which individual at any one time (open Wifi networks aside). But at least the same company doesnt know both.
The data AOL released was the equivalent of any other search engine releasing its searches with IP addresses, so the same damage could be done by any other search engines logs, but imagine how much a marketing company would pay for that info from AOL with the personal details for each user included (i.e. Age, Sex, location etc.).
You raise an important and oft-overlooked point.
This is exactly why I think it's so critical to evangelize with regard to using privacy measures. I want my mother, Aunt Sally, and 8-year old neice to be using TrueCrypt and Tor at a minimum (or, something providing similar functionality). Privacy / anonymity suites need to become as commonplace as antivirus, firewall and anti-spam software.
Helping strong privacy measures become the status-quo serves other important goals too. It makes it more politically costly to try to legislate them out of use, and it reduces the usefulness of developing new data mining programs that require person:transaction relationships - both for the government and for private industry.
In short, when everyone's Aunt Sally can be expected to have countermeasures against activity monitoring running on her home PC, the world will have become a safer place for all of us.
Pi Ran Out