AOL Releases Search Records from Half a Million Users

Hitting the news yesterday and today is a shocking story from our old pals at AOL. No, no berating of paying customers this time. Rather, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, AOL figured it would take 658,000 subscribers' search records over a three-month time period, remove the name of the user that did the searching, and put the whole thing online. The total: 21 million searches, which AOL says it wanted to use for its research division.

At first glance this sounds like it might not be so bad since the user name was removed, but a quick peek into the data reveals how wrong that is. Why? Because even without your name, many people can still be identified based on what you search for. It's common to search for specific names, addresses, phone numbers, and more. With three full months of data to work with, I'm sure it would be easy to piece together the identity of many internet users. Cnet has some excellent examples of these kinds of searches, culled from the data. How bad is it? One example is a searcher from Temple University in Philadelphia, whose searches included:

replica loius vuitton bag
how to stop bingeing
how to secretly poison your ex
how to color hair with clairol professional
girdontdatehim.com
websites that ask for payment by checks
south beach diet
nausea in the first two weeks of pregnancy
breast reduction
how to starve yourself
rikers island inmate info number
inmatelookup.gov
www.tuportal.temple.edu
how to care for natural black hair
scarless breast reduction
pregnancy on birth control
temple.edu
diet pills

I'm sure her colleagues have already figured out her identity.

And that's just a mildly embarassing example. The data is filled with people looking for advice on suicide, murder, illegal drugs, all sorts of criminal activity, and worse.

AOL has since removed the data and apologized profusely, but the damage is done: The information (over 400MB in size) has been downloaded and replicated across the internet. There's no getting the genie back into this bottle.

This is frightening stuff, and an insane abuse of power by AOL. Frankly, an apology just doesn't cut it.

I know some of you readers are AOL users. How do you feel about this mess? And will you be sticking with the service going forward? The comments are open.