“Much of the privacy debate today boils down to a lack of understanding of the enormity of the databases out there and how easy it would be to link one or two of them to create a locked down society where you cannot do anything without someone knowing about it.
I’m not actually sure how anyone familiar with the modern web-centric world could not have known that revealing people’s search queries would benefit no one except stalkers looking for an edge, marketing nuts looking for free data, and office clowns looking for new ways to harass fellow employees. There is really no other benefit. See related story.
I suppose the idea was thought to be a form of mild entertainment and I suppose that someone thought that giving a random number rather than a user’s name was protection enough to keep anyone from finding out who the users were.”
August 25, 2006 at 8:18 pm |
Being watched
A few weeks ago an AOL researcher mistakenly posted three months of search results for 658,000 users to the internet. While the data was not linked directly to user account, the 36 million search records contained very revealing details about…