Monday, August 07, 2006
Never. trust. the. internet.
[technology | AOL]Expect this to be on (or at least near) the front page of every newspaper in America tomorrow.
AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users (from digg)
AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May (2006) is now public information on the internet.
So if you are the AOL user who happened to be searching for ways to kill his wife, sucks to be you.
But wait! It gets better (worse). Since AOL Search is just rebranded Google Search, every Search Engine Optimization business is frantically scouring these files for keywords to bid on for Google Adsense placements. That is if you are a "legit" SEO. There are those who maintain that SEO is merely a polite term for spamming. So Google may be hit by a massive wave of junk spamdexes in the next few weeks.
Great, what else?
How about every one of these users getting phished / spoofed once the randomization algorithm that's hiding their usernames gets hacked? In fact, you don't even have to try very hard - most people do a search on their own name at least once, and on businesses in their address. To a dedicated stalk... data miner, that's just child's play. And remember AOL's user base is decidedly non technical - how easy would it be to send an email pretending to offer compensation for this fiasco?
Never. trust. the. internet.
UPDATE: Wow, I've just been combing through some of the searches. This is really addictive - in a voyeurish, leafing-through-the-celebrity-dumpster kind of way. Among other things, I've learned that a lot of people have no idea how to spell "tongue".
More random AOL crap later, unless the lawyers get here first.
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