AOL Privacy Blunder

As you may or may not know, AOL was created by Internet Gods as a punishment for lame lusers who are to lazy or stupid to get a real ISP. It is an evil, twisted corporate entity, hell bent on making it’s users miserable and drive them to madness.

True to their destructive mission, AOL has publicly released semi-anonymised logs from their search site. This essentially means that all the search queries made of over 500k users between the months of march and may 2006 were posted out in the open.

Why do I mean by semi-anonymised? The logs did not include actual usernames – just unique ID numbers. So while you cannot clearly infer that user number 2323432334 is actually crazykitten6969 you could do some identity revealing data mining. For example – have you ever searched for your own name? Or your friend’s names? Typed in your town’s name in the search box? I know I did. Everyone does!

Would it be possible to identify some of the users based on their search queries? And if yes, is there enough information there for identity theft? Could these logs be used by law enforcement to crack down on supposed “terrorists”?

Since AOL can match the usernames to the ID numbers used in the public report, someone could always subpoena them! Is searching for illegal topics a crime in itself? Could information gained from these logs be used by a police to get a search warrant? Oh, wait – I forgot that we no longer need warrants under the Patriot Act. Never mind that then…

As you can see, it is a huge privacy issue. AOL took down their results page relatively quickly. Naturally the logs are still available in other places. So whoever wants those search queries bad enough, will be able to get them whether AOL wants it or not.

Is it possible to prove that AOL breached user privacy on an unprecedented level here? Is it possible to build a case for a class action lawsuit? I sure hope so. Because if we take time now to nail AOL hard for such blatant privacy blunder, all the other companies will hopefully think twice before releasing any user related data.

Of course this is just one aspect of the story. These logs are a goldmine for SEO dickwads, advertisers, spammers and etc.. They will be gorging themselves on this information for next few weeks, and tweaking their scripts and strategies. Google will most likely need to adjust their page rank algorithms to combat the massive SEO tweakage.

[tags]aol, aol logs, privacy, seo[/tags]