Having looked through the two posts on somethingawful.com I'm not sure what the fuss is. While the posts certainly pointed out the seedy nature of many of our searches there was very little that could be construed to break someone's anonymity.
Now somethingawful.com focused on a certain type of search and maybe a look at the entire set of data would show people entering more personally identifiable information but I just didn't see that in the articles I've read so far.
In any case I've never thought I had any secret secure pipe to the search engine. And as SuperKendall pointed out, how is having the internal staff at a company (or them passing the data to a third party without public disclosure) worse than posting this data for public consumption.
The AOL CTO to me seems to be a scapegoat and I do think there are many legitimate uses for this type of information.
Is it the fact that the searches are identifiable to a particular individual (although one only identified by a number) that has everyone's dander up?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with SuperKendall on this.
Having looked through the two posts on somethingawful.com I'm not sure what the fuss is. While the posts certainly pointed out the seedy nature of many of our searches there was very little that could be construed to break someone's anonymity.
Now somethingawful.com focused on a certain type of search and maybe a look at the entire set of data would show people entering more personally identifiable information but I just didn't see that in the articles I've read so far.
In any case I've never thought I had any secret secure pipe to the search engine. And as SuperKendall pointed out, how is having the internal staff at a company (or them passing the data to a third party without public disclosure) worse than posting this data for public consumption.
The AOL CTO to me seems to be a scapegoat and I do think there are many legitimate uses for this type of information.
Is it the fact that the searches are identifiable to a particular individual (although one only identified by a number) that has everyone's dander up?