Slashdot Mirror
Execs at AOL Approved Release of Private Data?
reporter writes "The New York Times has published a report providing further details about the release of private AOL search queries to the public. According to the report: 'Dr. Jensen, who said he had worked closely with Mr. Chowdhury on projects for AOL's search team, also said he had been told that the posting of the data had been approved by all appropriate executives at AOL, including Ms. [Maureen] Govern.' The report also identifies the other two people whom AOL management fired: they are Abdur Chowdhury and his immediate supervisor. Chowdhury is the employee who did the actual public distribution of the private search queries. He, apparently, has retained a lawyer."
At this point, why would you want to stay at your present job if you need a lawyer to keep it... even if you are successful, why would you want to stay, it's obvious you won't be liked by management, since they're trying to get rid of you... Or am I missing something?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The search terms were not linked to any specific person, however, each search term was linked to a user ID. So you can compile a list of all searches a specific person did.
Partner this up with the fact the some people may search for the name, credit card number, and social security number to see if they're posted anywhere, you have some serious privacy concerns.
Take for example, (and I'm making this up), user #5, these are his search terms:
Joe Schmo
014-56-1234
4729-1234-5678-9012
Pizza stores near 1 main street, oakland, CA
Would you want this released to the public? What if some more of his search terms were:
How to divorce your wife
divorce lawyers
dating websites
how to cheat on your wife
russian brides
Ok, granted maybe you don't agree with what he's doing here, but is it right for this to be public??
Not even close to that simple. AOL didn't stand to make any money off this situation. The data was provided entirely "altruistically" for the benefit of researchers.
And what are these researchers "researching"? They are studying how to make searches more relevant, among other things.
Will more relevant searching make a buck for someone? Well, it's done wonders for Google, but the release of this data isn't making that research an AOL property. And we love Google because it gives us what we want to see up front, without digging for it.
In the end, the release of this data is a good thing, but the implementation of the release failed badly. Nevertheless, we *want* this data to get out, we just don't want it to get out in any way that can tag individuals.
Today the "little guy's" only defense against being taken advantage of by major corporations and the government is information and the ability to think for himself. A major problem, though, is that even those few trying to think for themselves are at the mercy of the information they are given. That's the information on which they base their decisions. The more corporations and governments know about what we are interested in and find important, the more they can tailor the information we receive to influence in their direction.
Classic marketing and academic research isn't the issue here. The issue is our ability to choose. This is the same reason the Net Neutrality issue matters, because it can directly affect our ability to find good (useful, true) information. Even if these issues weren't considered when the data was released (and I'm sure they were), such sharing of personal data amounts to criminal negligence when caring for other people's quality of life, and yes, lives. Because among the people using this information are people who directly affect our ability to live and yet seem to be driven more by monetary concerns, such as pharmaceutical companies.
That's a bit cynical, don't you think?
If they really wanted to make the most money possible, they would have sold these logs (non-anonymized) to the scores of direct marketers that I'm sure would love to have this data. Instead, they packaged it up and tried to make it available to academic researchers. These researchers honestly just want to make better search engines that run faster and return better results. Furthermore, when academics come up with a great new idea, it gets published so that anyone can read it.
Every once in a while, someone suggests an open source search engine. Check out Nutch if you want to see work in this area. However, if open source search solutions are going to be any good at all, they'll have to rely on the decades of public, published information retrieval research that's already out there.
We are entering a time when companies are capable of totally outpacing academia because they have query log data, so they know exactly what users actually do. There is no way that an academic can get this kind of data unless a company releases it. Researchers at AOL, in good faith, tried to release data so researchers could have a chance at success. Ultimately, of course, that's good for AOL since they're not in the top three search engines out there. Public research can only help raise AOL's standing by helping to level the playing field. But, it's good for you too, because you can build your open source solution based on this research too.
Yes, the release was botched, and yes, the long term user identifiers were a mistake. But don't make AOL out to be some evil company that was only out to destroy your privacy. They made a mistake!
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. It depends on the type of information you are talking about.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The real problem is that they shouldn't have been keeping it in the first place!
If it can harm a consumer by its release, then it can harm that same consumer by the fact that the have it in their possession in the first place. Just how is AOL that much better or more trustworthy than the world at large?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."