Selling Out the AOL User

The New York Times was the first to capitalize on AOL's colossal blunder, publishing an account of a woman in Georgia who acknowledged she was User 4417749. You should be prepared for more of the same in the coming weeks as media outlets everywhere exploit what should never have become public. The New York Times subpoenaed the search engines - the very thing we cheered Google about when they refused to release the information. Privacy is important, and shouldn't be exploited for government or gain. There are any number of reasons a person searches for a particular thing and, especially if there are multiple users of an account, queries are only evidence of interest, not of intent or action. I'm going to give examples of what I found, leaving out the unique ID numbers, to show how damaging this can be. Examples:

User A is possibly a high-ranking state government official (state withheld), potentially linked with the state-level Secretary of State's office. He or she (but probably he) does a lot of policy and tax research, as well as name-specific election results research. He is or was in the Navy, graduated from the Naval Academy and is still on Navy medical insurance. He recently took or is taking a trip to St. Louis on business and while researching travel information, checked out a site on St. Louis escort services. Other searches (lots of them) include instructions on sexual techniques, body parts, and bestiality. Did he conduct all these searches? Maybe. But he could also have a teenage son very interested in how, exactly, the opposite sex works and if there really are photos of animal relations on the Internet like his friends say. Half of User B's search logs focus on Christian theology, imagery, events, stories, and ways to debunk the Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark murdok: