Serving as a Bad Example: AOL Privacy Debacle - Reaction of Researchers and Marketers
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There can be no doubt that AOL’s release of search data was an unmitigated disaster in certain quarters. But to others, it was like water in the desert – or perhaps a better analogy would be the somewhat guilty pleasure of a mug of hot chocolate in the afternoon to keep you going. Here, of course, I’m talking about marketers and researchers who are all but desperate in their need for data.
Steve Beitzel, an affiliated researcher with the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Information Retrieval Lab, raised an interesting point. “Researchers at universities or small companies don’t have access to this type of data. I think the [AOL] researchers were trying to do a good thing by making this available to the research community.” The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions; on the other hand, Beitzel is correct in fingering this as a problem.
How often do researchers have access to this kind of data? In 2003, hundreds of thousands of internal email messages were opened to the public on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s web site. Web researchers pounced on this horde, and several research papers focusing on it have emerged since. It is the only large body of actual email in the public domain. As to actual search data, academic researchers have to settle for two sets of data – one from Excite and one from Alta Vista, and both of them nearly a decade old.
Search engines have improved tremendously in that amount of time, and searchers have changed their strategies accordingly. That makes the old data practically useless. While the fresh data is seriously tempting to many academic researchers, some won’t touch it. Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell, downloaded the data – but has decided against using it. “The number of things it reveals about individual people seems much too much,” Kleinberg explained. “In general, you don’t want to do research on tainted data.”
Marketers have been less reserved about using the data, though so far the discoveries haven’t been as awful as you might think. One observer noted that “No one can spell” and that users are apparently in serious need of three kinds of vertical search engines: one focused on health, one for religious queries, and one – of course – for pornography. Another observer noted from examining the data that “Satisfying a search intention may take weeks – or months,” meaning that advertisers should be patient with their search campaigns and think long term.
It will be some time before we feel the full effects of AOL’s breach of privacy debacle. But it has certainly exposed us to the conflicting needs of everyone who uses search. Now that all of this is out in the open, perhaps we’ll see a discourse about how search engines can best serve their users – all of them.
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