Are internet search histories the ultimate invasion of our privacy?
Everyone has a billboard ad they hate. For me, it's "AOL/discuss". Perhaps it's because I spend a good part of my working life pondering the eight-foot-high questions plastered across them ("Is technology killing the art of conversation? AOL/discuss") that whenever the bus is driving past one, I strain my neck to see it just so that I can hate it more.
AOL will have been asking itself some tough questions lately. This month, to the horror of the blogosphere, it released 658,000 personal, three-month-long search histories for US users. So, AOL, is the internet the ultimate invasion of privacy? Let's/discuss.
What did you search for in the past three months? Last-minute beach holidays? Your nearest vet? Porn? If you are anything like the average Brit (who, according to recent research, spends 50 whole days each year online), you'll be conducting ever more of your business and personal life through cyberspace. And it won't always be stuff that you want other people to know about.
The dataset, published by AOL Labs, was intended for research analysts. In it, the internet protocol addresses of individual users had been anonymised and replaced with unique numerical IDs. Although this meant the individual searchers could not be identified, each search history was extremely revealing. There was the poker fan researching ways to commit suicide, the flat-hunter in Charlton, Massachusetts trying to win custody of his children, and the searcher whose history centred obsessively around ways to kill your wife.
Shortly after publishing the data, AOL realised its mistake and removed it, stating that this innocent attempt to reach out to academics had been "a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it". But it was too late to stop the inevitable mirrors of the downloaded file from appearing all over the net. And, as tech commentators observed, for all the anonymisation of IP addresses, the personal interests of users revealed by the data were too much for anyone to stomach.
Are you comfortable with what search engines know about you? No matter which search engine you prefer, it's likely that there's a record of everything you've ever searched for, held in some data farm somewhere. Just like supermarket loyalty card schemes, search engines collect this data so that they can target ads and services at you. AOL, Google, Yahoo! - they're all in the media business now, selling eyeballs to advertisers, based on what turns out to be the rather specific stuff they know about you.
So should we stop them? The methods they use to collect data have the power to build hundreds of communities of shared interests that contribute to the vibrancy of the web. Instead of targeting the technology, we need to make sure we have the laws in place so that neither individuals nor the state can have access to such records again.
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