I’ve even spoken with experts and experienced computer users who fear the Social Network driven Web 2.0 “stuff” out there. Good news! Before I got to busy with Ruby on Rails to update the site everyday, I bounced around with Web 2.0 services like Facebook, MyBlogLog, Flock, friendfeed, Flickr, PodCastAlley, MySpace, Seesmic, Ma.Gnolia and OpenID and received absolutely stunning results without more effort. I expect that this won’t fully sway skeptics, but you should hear what benefits came from my work of several days in plumbing the depths on your behalf.
I just had to interrupt myself in the middle of a big task when I saw Flock’s new update add visited PAGETITLES to the browser’s address bar as I began to type in PIPES for pipes.yahoo.com
8.09 – I just gave an oped piece on AOL suggesting how they could stay on top and stay alive. AOL seems to have misunderstood me and published the search terms of a half million users. Search terms can be figured out by evil-doers to lead to some bad, identity thieving results. Although user names were covered with random numbers, people tend to search themselves thereby revealing their identities.
Any other company that gave away so much personal data would be fined a huge amount of money to cover the cost of clients re-securing themselves. Consider this extrapolated data found within the AOL paper that it sent to R&D professionals:
Hmm, i find it fascinating that user 545605’s searches are “shore hills park mays landing nj”, “frank william sindoni md”, “ceramic ashtrays”, “transfer money to china”, and “capital gains on sale of house”. I wonder how Mr. Frank William in Sindoni, Maryland will feel about being included in your publicized data.
So here’s the fastest of it…
The entire file (nearly 500MB of it) can be downloaded here as of publishing this article. Information in the download is already resulting in articles like, “Top 50 Search ‘Words’,” and more horrifically, How to Kill Your Wife from AOL user 17556639 – Remember that User ID’s have been disguised. But even we have downloaded the entire contents. Finding 17556639 might not be a challenge.
Every news organization (including AOL TimeWarner) is scrambling to cover this and get the latest. initial reports on the facts and data itself are chilling and popping up like weeds on the green fields of AOL’s utopic Internet. The legal fights Google has had with the USA government over the privacy of searches have just been dashed by AOL who uses the Google search engine to operate.
News making AOL users: No. 4417749 and No. 927No. 927’s link is straight AOL data.
No. 17556639 spelled decapitated wrong too probably prolonging his wife’s life. If you’re a hitman, you may have just found a client if you get to him before his wife’s family does a little ‘house-cleaning’…
