They know all about you

[spindrifter]

Monday August 28, 2006
The Guardian


In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. "My wife doesnt love animore," he told the machine. He searched for "Stop your divorce" and "I want revenge to my wife" before turning to self-examination with "alchool withdrawl", "alchool withdrawl sintoms" (at 10 in the morning) and "disfunctional erection". On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could "predict my futur".

But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google - from which AOL buys in its search functions.

The gigantic database detailing these customers' search inquiries was available on an AOL research site for just a few hours before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names did not really protect their identities enough. The company apologised for its mistake - and removed the database from the internet. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and last week AOL's chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, resigned. But those few hours online were enough for the raw data files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now four or five sites where anyone can search through them using specialised software.

What was published by AOL represents only a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge warehoused within Google's records - but it has given all of us, as users, a dramatic and unsettling glimpse of how much, and in what intimate detail, the big search engines know about us.

<more>

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/search/story/0,,1859785,00.html

[AndyA]

1. I think it should be mandatory that all search records are purged at least

every 24 hours. There is no need for anyone to maintain a history of what people search for. Google and the other search engines also know which sites you click on, what type of browser you're using, your screen resolution, and quite a bit more.

And there is no reason for this information to be retained.

[spindrifter]

2. A very reasonable idea--but of course,

the biggies in the field use what they mine from our internet travels to try to sell us stuff--at this point. Next, of course, it will be the thought police out there. If the White House wants to know who has been looking at websites about little-known rebellions in far-away places, they'll just ask their search engines to turn our names over to them.