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The first of many identities revealed
44 commentsThe first person to be positively identified due to the AOL search query release this weekend is the lucky Ms. Thelma Arnold. Or at least the first person to allow her name to be put in print, that is. I'm willing to bet the authors of the article identified at least one or two other candidates, and Ms. Arnold was just the first they could contact. Give it another day or two and I'm sure more people will be positively identified. There's just too much data, too easily searched, for more people to not show up.
AOL has already admitted what they did was wrong. They've apologized in general, and apparently to Ms. Arnold in particular. But I still see lawsuits in the near future as more people are found due to their search queries. And some people won't have innocent explanations for the nature of their searches like Ms. Arnold did.
I have a friend who watched an episode of CSI a couple of years ago and saw something he'd never seen before, furries. He was fascinated by the fact that there are people out there who like dressing up in animal costumes to indulge in their fantasies. He spent a couple weeks doing searches and laughing whenever he found some strange new twist to this fetish. Then one day he satisfied his curiosity and moved on. Imagine if his search queries had been part of the data AOL exposed to the Internet. If you were researching some of the account information in the database, what would you think of someone who's been spending a lot of their time searching for 'furries dalmatian Virginia'?
There is the potential for a lot of embarrassing, personal information to be revealed because of AOL's mistake. The reporters and the mildly curious will probably forget about the database in a week or two. But the malicious and the obsessive amongst us will keep at the database for months to come. When are we going to hear about the first attempts to blackmail someone who's been searching about their personal kink? Or until someone is arrested based on the searches they did? The information is there for the people who have the time and the skills to ferret it out.
Privacy isn't quite dead in the era of the Internet, but it's taking quite a hit. Most people don't realize that their search queries aren't just answered and dropped. All of the search companies keep track of the queries, it's just a question of how long. The queries you make reveal a lot about you, what your interested in and what you've been researching. Which is exactly why so much effort has been spent in keeping the search queries out of the hands of the government. We have to defend our privacy if we want to keep what little's left, and companies like AOL aren't making the job any easier.
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