AOL releases user-search-logs to public
seems like AOL’s recently shattered public image (see this recently leaked recording of a disastrous support-phonecall, or this story about a woman unable to cancel the AOL-connection of her dead father) just got another big crack today: in a blatant attempt to gain momentum among web-related research and science, AOL admittedly released search-profiles of 500.000 random customers on an AOL-website hosted at research.aol.com. the site has been turned off by now, but there are still mirrors hosting the 440mbyte download. officially, AOL is playing down the incidence, stressing the fact that the search-logs have been anonymized prior release. however, as Michael Arrington points out, even anonymized logs can easily be used to identify persons.
Jason Calacanis (AOL executive in charge of Weblogs & netscape.com) suggests not to keep any search-data at all. a noble idea, but since personalized search and targeted ad’s already are or soon will be based on user-search-profiles, I’m afraid that won’t happen anytime soon.
update: AOL’s official press-statement on the issue
update: aolsearchdatabase.com offers a comfortable search-interface to the published logs. meanwhile, mirrors still seem to be online.
A site where you can search this data is here:
http://www.datablunder.com/logitems/query/
[...] everyone even slightly interested in MMOG SecondLife, probably already heard yesterdays bad news: an official security announcement on Linden Labs (creators of SL) reported a hack of SL’s database earlier this week. Linden Labs admits that user-data (account-names, reallife-names and contact-information) was compromised, which is why all residents are required to re-new their passwords in order to reactive their currently inactive accounts. LL claims that creditcard- and payment-information has not been disclosed, as these are stored seperately. clearly, this is a major bummer. as TechCrunch notes, SL-chatlogs and behavioral data (and yes, that includes tons of sexual actions performed!) publicly available in large scale, would even make AOL’s recent privacy-waterloo look like peanuts. [...]