A couple of days ago, AOL released search data upon the world. Not just any random old search data, but data by 650,000 AOL users, each with their searches “anonymized” by putting a number next to them (as in, you can still identify the user, just not which user). It a somewhat strange “slip up” by AOL (they later retracted the data and said it was a mistake to release) it revealed search queries over three months.
Some of the more interesting have been thrown into a flash animation.
The problem is with their apparent “anonymizing.” It doesn’t really do a fat load of good. The New York Times was able to track down one of these people who made this list. Her search terms were all read out to her, and she confirmed they were hers. You could still basically track what these people were doing over these three months, a “snap shot” of their lives if you will.
But, that said, would releasing the data without any identifier at all made the situation any less worse? Probably not.
It is going to be some time before AOL is trusted again by many. Of course, from the sounds of it, not many did in the first place!
Despite AOL taking it off their servers, it doesn’t prevent people already with the data from spreading it. There are many numerous servers and torrents to download this data from.
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