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Opinion
The AOL Data Release: A Tipping Point?
8/16/2006
By Terry Calhoun
Whether this will affect the search behavior of many other people is unknown. It d'esn’t seem to me, from casual conversations, that many of my acquaintances would have even heard of this security beach if they hadn’t learned of it from me.
It certainly has not changed my own searching habits. I’m not the least bit concerned about being exposed as searching for “lolitas” or “how to murder your wife.” It could be that in a future political state a bit more totalitarian than the current administration has so far pushed the U.S. to be, I could begin to be a little worried about some of my searches; for example, about Pat Robertson’s claims to bench press 2,000 pounds.
Some thoughts by others, given a few days to think it over:
“The extent to which search engine queries alone can reveal one’s identity should be an eye-opener to individuals and privacy advocates alike.”
“Search terms can expose the most intimate details of a person’s life: private information about family problems, medical history, financial situation, political and religious beliefs, sexual preferences, and much more.”
What I find the most interesting is that the nature of the search queries captured by AOL do not necessarily showcase the intelligence of the people searching for something. Not only is there seemingly a complete lack of Boolean inquiry structure, but analysis of the released data by the folks at AOL Stalker indicates that in 47 percent of searches people doing the browsing didn’t even click on a single result. Not an indication of intelligent searching. But, then, that kind of captures what we’ve all thought about the generic AOL user for more than a decade now.
I used AOL Stalker to search for a few things of interest to me:
“Terry Calhoun”: Bummer, no one searched for me. 20,000,000 searches and no one cared. Darn.
“Ann Arbor”: There were, among the 20,000,000+ searches, 154 for “Ann Arbor.” Unfortunately, they were nearly all commercial in nature and pretty boring. People wanted to find out where to get a tattoo, about events in Ann Arbor, about real estate, and so forth.
“Disc Golf”: Only 47 searches in the database. Again, rather boring. People are either looking for courses (not knowing about the PDGA online database, I guess), bags, or tournaments.
“East Liverpool”: How about my home town? Wow, 70 searches with that phrase in it, about a small Ohio River Valley town that has had little besides a series of economic disasters since the early 1950s.
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