[silfverstierna]

AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data

AOL must have missed the uproar over the DOJ’s demand for “anonymized” search data last year that caused all sorts of pain for Microsoft and Google. That’s the only way to explain their release of data that includes 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users.

The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period this year, as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the result page. It’s a 439 MB compressed download, expanded to just over 2 gigs.

The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.

Länk

[Charlie]

Detta är HELT SJUKT. De verkar ha insett sitt misstag och släckt ner URLen. Men det dyker upp allt fler och fler mirrors. Datan är släppt och är här för att stanna. Det blir spännande att se hur konkurrenter, myndigheter, privatpersoner och främst AOL själva kommer att svara på detta.

[grazzy]

Ojoj. Nu kanske man slipper få så mycket spam när spammarna kan skicka riktad spam till aol-users istället. "Hej, jag såg att du bor på 234 Suckerville och söker efter viagra, vi kan erbjuda riktigt bra priser" :P

Edit: länk från orginalbloggen, http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/...t-mega-spammed/

Som sagt.. bara tanka hem och köra ett par varv med cut, uniq och sort så har vi 3000 nya domäner att regga inom 15 minuter..

[Mattias]

Haha, vad ska man säga...

Edit: Undrar vem som först lanserar en tjänst med förenklade analyser med denna databas.

[silfverstierna]

AOL: “This was a screw up”

All –

This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.

Here was what was mistakenly released:

* Search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users over a three month period from March to May.

* There was no personally identifiable data provided by AOL with those records, but search queries themselves can sometimes include such information.

* According to comScore Media Metrix, the AOL search network had 42.7 million unique visitors in May, so the total data set covered roughly 1.5% of May search users.

* Roughly 20 million search records over that period, so the data included roughly 1/3 of one percent of the total searches conducted through the AOL network over that period.

* The searches included as part of this data only included U.S. searches conducted within the AOL client software.

We apologize again for the release.

Andrew Weinstein
AOL Spokesman

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07...as-a-screw-up/

[silfverstierna]

AOL Data: First Web Interface Up

It was only a matter of time before someone put up a simple web interface to the 20 million search queries published by AOL last week

A commenter on our original post wrote:

Here’s something you guys might like. I whipped this up to help those of you who don’t feel like grepping your way through 2 gigs of files. it’s a searchable mySQL database of these searches (most of them, anyway, I’m not done indexing yet) with all redundancies removed, searchable by categories. Hopefully this should make for a few hours of fun.

They even picked out a suitable domain name and took the time to wrap it in Google ads. See AOLSearchDatabase.com to search the data via user ID, search terms, date of search or website results.

Tech Crunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/08...-interfaces-up
AOL Search Database: http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com

[grazzy]

Buhu. Jag ville ju vara först :P