nytimes.com — Ms. Arnold, who agreed to discuss her searches with a reporter, said she was shocked to hear that AOL had saved and published three months’ worth of them. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.”
Aug 9, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountAug 9, 2006
From the article "Some programmers made this easier by setting up Web sites that let people search the database of searches." - does anyone have any links?
llanAug 9, 2006
I bet she got some hand tremors when the reporter told her her search queries...
frozenwookieAug 9, 2006
aol is slowly but surely going down...
dougbdlAug 9, 2006
I have never seen a company that f**ks up as often and as consistently as AOL.Can you imagine being a stockholder? Ugh!
transeunteAug 9, 2006
> “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,”An overstatement, if anything.
ryosenAug 9, 2006
?We apologize specifically to her,? he said. ?The rest of you can just sod off.?
astrotrainAug 9, 2006
How about a giant peach that looks like a giant ass in Georgia?<a class="user" href="http://www.gaffney-sc.com/Waterpeach.htm">http://www.gaffney-sc.com/Waterpeach.htm</a>
Closed AccountAug 9, 2006
AOL only released the database.People who I guess fap off to other people's private data wrote the scripts to search through them all the day, find some odd ones, and post it on the internets so other people can point and laugh at the odd searches too.I bet 99% of you reading this have some searches you'd like to be kept private, oh how I wish Google would do the same as well, but Google doesn't suck, so that won't happen.
fallen1Aug 9, 2006
bitcloud, "Old ladies have mortgages" but they also have a) lawyers who will work pro bono (technically for the exposure in this case) OR will work for a percentage of the award and b) have much better chance of getting both public good will and sympathy behind them. The old saying about "there is no such thing as bad news" does NOT apply when MegaCorporation reveals the entire personal life of Grandma. Even the apathetic citizens of the USA won't stand for that and that translates into negative press and declining share price.
chadedgeAug 9, 2006
Years ago I ran a Web site called "killaol.com" which explained the EULA - the full version which you couldn't read until you were already a customer (slick).Part of AOL's signup agreement states that you must accept their usage agreement, which you are presented with an abridged version (a paragraph explained that you would receive the full version once you were a customer). If you requested the full EULA, you were asked to become a customer or to get one from an existing customer (via e-mail and phone conversations this was discovered).What we found in the EULA: AOL is *not* an ISP; instead, they are a list broker of the highest cost - direct marketing companies such as AccudataAmerica sold the AOL "gold" list at a premium. The list contained summary information about users which was based on their browsing, e-mail, search and conversation histories. It was the most complete profile list I've ever seen. In direct marketing terms, the AOL list would nearly allow you to determine when a person would be most likely to purchase their next quart of milk (pure gold for direct marketers).Partner the AOL gold list with a transworld, experian, or other CC-based list and you'd have everything you could ever use to identify qualified leads for everything from toothpaste to sommelflanges.Of course, AOL was pissed as hell and went as far as having our 1u server physically yanked from our vegas server farm (at first, the farm was threatened with their entire class being blacklisted from AOL). If you did the math, a 1u server could hold about 200 domains, with 20-40 U's per rack, 4 racks per block, and about 500 blocks on the floor. That's 16,000,000 domains that could have paid the price for killaol.com telling the truth. The farm promptly yanked the server (an old Penguin Relion) and the domain went black. Months later, the server 'phoned-home,' from Vancouver!I spent three years exposing the AOL direct-marketing and list brokerage. I've always felt that, if you're willing to accept the sale of your personal information in exchange for what appears to be a good service (appears), then you have no complaints when the sale occurrs. I liken the sale to the same thing that happens when you use a check/discount card at your local grocer.However, AOL made it very, very difficult for their customers to discover this fact.
eysenAug 9, 2006
Here is an experiment to create a wiki to discuss the AOL dataset:<a class="user" href="http://www.jmir.org/wiki/index.php/AOL500k">http://www.jmir.org/wiki/index.php/AOL500k</a>Please contribute
cybernezumiAug 10, 2006
or c) this has class action lawsuit written all over it...