Serving as a Bad Example: AOL Privacy Debacle - Reaction of the Press and Privacy Advocates
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Dr. Chowdhury may not have anticipated that the AOL search data could be used to track down individuals after anonymization, but the media certainly did. Many bloggers pointed out that the searches included phone numbers, addresses, names, and possibly even Social Security numbers. Since many searches included local elements, it would be an easy matter to narrow a searcher down to a geographical location, and even an age and gender.
Two publications took it one better: they proved that you could trace a person from their searches. The New York Times traced one set of searches to an actual user, and revealed her identity (with her permission): 62-year-old Thelma Arnold, who lives in Georgia, loves dogs, and has a number of friends with serious physical ailments. Wired News stated that it was able to discover the identity of a 14-year-old through the search records.
If this alone wasn’t enough to scare people, many reporters were more than happy to point out that certain anonymized users were conducting the kinds of searches they wouldn’t want to have talked about on television. CNET posted a list of searches from 16 different users that went on for more than four pages. They revealed a number of disturbing things, like the successful, overweight, apparently conservative searcher with an interest in child porn, not to mention all the people looking to get even with an ex or divorce their spouses – or even kill them, in at least one case. There were also those trying to deal with depression (or not deal with it, judging from the queries about committing suicide); make a new start; avoid dealing with a DUI ticket; avoid paying taxes, legally or otherwise; and so on. As one observer noted, it’s almost as if search engines are the new confessional, taking in all our “sins.”
That was certainly more than enough for the privacy advocates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a complaint against AOL with the Federal Trade Commission. In the complaint, the EFF expressed its belief that AOL violated its own privacy policy, to say nothing of federal law. Specifically, the 11-page complaint accuses AOL of committing “unfair and deceptive trade practices by intentionally and publicly disclosing Internet search histories of more than half a million AOL users.” The World Privacy Forum also filed a 19-page FTC complaint against AOL, stating its belief that the company “engaged in unfair or deceptive acts or practices as defined by Section 5(a) of the FTC Act.” While these are not actually lawsuits, FTC complaints can certainly be nearly as bothersome, as even Microsoft has discovered.
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