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Opinion
AOL Spills: The Rest of Us Feel Chills
8/9/2006
By Terry Calhoun
What if we could know what you are planning to do? What if we thought we knew what you are planning to do? What if law enforcement thought it knew what you were planning to do? These became questions for the real world earlier this week.
Q: Is it possible to identify someone with precision if you know nothing about them except the text of the queries they have typed into a search engine?
A: Yes.
How do we know? A research group at AOL thought it would be useful for academics to analyze the search text query data, and shared AOL’s online. They apparently didn’t have the authority to do so, but didn’t know that. AOL took it down pretty fast, but the genie was out of the bottle and it had been copied and transmitted all over the Internet. The data even tells you whether a searcher clicked on a corresponding link. Some sites are now devoted to making it available for anyone to play with.
Now what do the searches really tell us about the people who typed them in, and their intent? One thing is for sure: in many cases, we can find out who they are. The first to be discovered was Thelma Arnold.
The queries typed into the AOL search engine by Thelma were among 20M+ such queries accidentally made available on the Internet by an AOL error. No personal identifying information was revealed by AOL. In the accidentally shared data, Ms. Arnold was identified only as user No. 4417749.
“Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher’s anonymity, but it was not much of a shield.”
All the quotations are from a New York Times article, “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749.”
In fact, those 20M+ queries were made by a total of 657,000 users, each identified only by an identification number. Yet investigators were able to identify Ms. Arnold from an analysis of her queries:
“No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ‘numb fingers’ to ‘60 single men’ to ‘dog that urinates on everything.’”
Other investigators claim that they have managed to analyze the data to identify a whole host of other AOL users. The Electronic Privacy Information Center calls the data that AOL and other search engines compile and cross-link “a ticking time bomb.”
“And search-by-search, click-by-click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ‘landscapers in Lilburn, Ga.,’ several people with the last name Arnold, and ‘homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.’”
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