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Anyone here using AOL?

You've just been opened up to stalkers, data miners, and all kinds of other creepy life forms.

AOL Releases Users Private Data On Web #1

AOL Releases Users Private Data On Web #2

AOL Releases Users Private Data On Web #3

Note here that AOL didn't hand over this data to the US Department of Justice for a spot of "fishing for terrorists" ... they published the data on the web for anyone to download.

650,000 AOL users' search engine queries, all nicely arranged in tab delimited format so that it could be run through Access and Excel for correlation analysis. So if you're an AOL user, and you typed anything into your search engine in the past 3 months, you're on this list.

Now, while the data doesn't actually contain user names, what it DOES contain is a randomly assigned User ID. Trouble is, there's enough information in there to allow unscrupulous individuals to work out which AOL user corresponds to which User ID. So if you suddenly start receiving a LOT of creepy spam in the next few weeks, this is why. Dear old AOL handed your private data lock, stock and barrel over to anyone who wants to use it or misuse it, free of charge. Needless to say, direct marketers are wetting themselves over this.

The implications are more far reaching than that though. You could have a perfectly legitimate reason for searching on a controversial topic - you're a teenager writing a term paper for a high school class, a university student compiling a dissertation for your course, or a graduate researcher striving to gain that coveted Ph.D. Probably won't be much help when strange persons in suits knock on your door, and it turns out they're from the FBI, and they want to know what connections you have with terrorist organisations because you searched for <insert any of hundreds of search terms here including some surprisingly innocuous ones> ....


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Trouble is, there's enough information in there to allow unscrupulous individuals to work out which AOL user corresponds to which User ID

FALSE

I'd like to know what makes you think that...

Courtesy of one of the links above:

"The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with &nbsp; queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with 'buy ecstasy' and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."

This doeesn't take into account the tools available to professional data miners. Wasn't that long ago that the CEO of Google was boasting that he'd create "A Google that knows more about you than you do yourself", and data mining tools were probably high on the agenda.

From another of the above links:

Law enforcement agencies, particularly in the US, tend to receive more strict oversight than corporations. The immediate harm for ordinary citizens comes not from paranoid SF fantasies, but from the "database of inferences" being exploited for commercial gain.

More lives are affected every day by the actions of banks, insurance companies and HMOs, than they are by data-mining cops. If your LiveJournal blog contains more frowns than smileys, you may well need to be prescribed a course of an anti-depressant. If your lifestyle involves risky situations in night spots, you may well need to pay a higher insurance premium. Yet such invasive data mining is the inexorable conclusion of overestimating the value of this harvest of so-called "machine wisdom".

People would be rightly be outraged if Big Pharma, banks and the insurance business created "inference profiles" based on one's data trail. But, wait! That's what they already do. Human decision-making is playing an increasingly smaller role in whether credit applications are approved, or what kind of health care is permissible. When corporations do this, they are making implicit moral choices - that one person is more or less than deserving than another - but obscuring the decision behind a smokescreen of technology babble.

Data mining is an area of research that has had a LOT of big corporate money thrown at it. Some of those tools include state of the art neural networks whose decision making capabilities are quite something to behold. Feed this data into one of those and it won't take it long to rearrange the data to fit all kinds of purposes - including identity tracing if someone wishes to do that.

Combine this with a team of experienced database admins and what you have is a heat seeking privacy invasion missile.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Scaremongering if ever I saw it.

Data mining is an area of research that has had a LOT of big corporate money thrown at it. Some of those tools include state of the art neural networks whose decision making capabilities are quite something to behold. Feed this data into one of those and it won't take it long to rearrange the data to fit all kinds of purposes - including identity tracing if someone wishes to do that.

Hmm,, I dunno. In my old job I was working with a specialist datamining company, who datamine for fundraising companies. It was very person intensive, expensive and not an exact science or art by any stretch

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

This seems like one of those "WATCH OUT YOU MAY GET SPAM!" type of things. Here is a simple solution: Don't post personal info on the web.

Inky