August 09, 2006
If you haven't been following, AOL earlier this week released the search records from 500,000 users. This was not at request of the DoJ but was supposedly for the betterment of academic research (or marketing research). Well, there was a firestorm of protest because even though the users were anonymous, it isn't too hard to piece someone together via their search history. The data was removed from AOL's site but not before people horked it and spread it all over. Outgrowths from this story:
- AOL search history appears to show someone preparing to commit murder
- People have all sorts of weird obsessions
- NYT successfully found an old lady in Georgia via her search history
- Try your own luck at searching the logs: I can't recommend enough user 711391 (Waxy calls it "an unbelievable epic")
One other article talking about the impact here.
You can always count on Something Awful to bring up the worst of the worst.
So sad that The Onion's spoof can't possibly be funnier than the truth.
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Amazing: an Onion article come to life. This ZDNet article has some more profiles.
posted by mrflip at 01:59PM CST on August 09