In a daring move, AOL has 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.
This was not a leak - it was intentional. In their desperation to gain recognition from the research community, AOL decided they would compromise their integrity to provide a data set that might become often-cited in research papers: “Please reference the following publication when using this collection…” is the message before the download.
This is a blatant violation of users’ privacy. The data is “anonymized”, which to AOL means that each screenname was replaced with a unique number. “It is still a research question how much information needs to be anonymized to protect users,” says Abdur from AOL. Here are some examples of what you can find in the data:
User 491577 searches for “florida cna pca lakeland tampa”, “emt school training florida”, “low calorie meals”, “infant seat”, and “fisher price roller blades”. Among user 39509’s hundreds of searches are: “ford 352″, “oklahoma disciplined pastors”, “oklahoma disciplined doctors”, “home loans”, and some other personally identifying and illegal stuff I’m going to leave out of here. Among 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”. Compared to some of the data, these examples are on the safe side. I’m leaving out the worst of it - searches for names of specific people, addresses, telephone numbers, illegal drugs, and more. There is no question that law enforcement, employers, or friends could figure out who some of these people are.
In my opinion, this is a step towards user privacy violation. I’m sure that many of the thousands of people whose search data was logged and distributed for all to read, wouldn’t be happy if any Average Joe could see what they searched for.
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