Privacy in the information age

[bascule]

I feel a little bit like Towelie following DC14, so it seems time to post a pithy thread and perhaps regain a bit of my already sparkling reputation.

AOL recently released 21 million search queries by 650,000 of its users:

http://news.com.com/AOL+offers+distu...98.html?tag=nl

Usernames were replaced with numbers in hopes of protecting the anonymity of the users performing the searches. However, since searches could be cross-referenced by user, a large enough corpus of search data provided a substantial amount of personal data on the user performing the search. This was enough for Internet sleuths to figure out the identity of at least one of the individuals whose data was released:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/te...erland&emc=rss

AOL has since made the data unavailable, but unfortunately, this is the information age, and the data virally spread throughout the Internet. I'll forego the opportunity to stick the Bascule-approved moniker describing this phenomena on it and leave that to your imagination.

The data has since been indexed and rendered searchable:

http://www.aolstalker.com/

What does this all mean for privacy as data-mining algorithms continue to grow more intelligent? What sort of data trail do we leave on the Internet via our searches? Can Google identify and cross-reference users by their search habits, regardless of their location?

How much does Google know about you from your searches?

Scary stuff... but I for one see the loss of privacy as an inevitability as the Singularity approaches. And I for one welcome our Google overlords!

[jedi]

Re: Privacy in the information age

The data has since been indexed and rendered searchable:

http://www.aolstalker.com/

This one is also floating around:

http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com

What does this all mean for privacy as data-mining algorithms continue to grow more intelligent? What sort of data trail do we leave on the Internet via our searches? Can Google identify and cross-reference users by their search habits, regardless of their location?

How much does Google know about you from your searches?

Scary stuff... but I for one see the loss of privacy as an inevitability as the Singularity approaches. And I for one welcome our Google overlords!

Why stop with search? Imagine how much data google has on someone who uses two of their services (say search and mail)? What about three (search, mail and calendar)?

I've watched a number of my friends switch their entire online existance to google services. Even if I take precautions to not use google, I'm still apart of google's data set if I contact any of them electonically.

When I look at it that way, I think we've already lost any hope of privacy.