REPOST: The Search Engine Confessional - AOL's snapshot into very private lives (8/9/06)

[Poll_Blind]

The Search Engine Confessional - AOL's snapshot into very private lives

This was written by me, Poll_Blind. Every example given, nomatter how vague or specific is based on dozens and dozens of searches I've carried out, myself, against the actual AOL database. I'm not willing to provide any more specific information.

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Just after midnight a young man who is on his last emotional and psychological legs, hounded by the police and creditors, does a line of cocaine. It's not his first, he's a regular user. He's previously suspected that the cocaine was cut with something, possibly fiberglass. Whether or not it's drug-induced paranoia or something he sees in the coke, after snorting this line his nose starts bleeding.

And it won't stop.

Just a few days later he's snorting it again even though it makes his whole head too sensitive to touch. Out of control, in trouble with the law, well-along on the path to self-destruction and all before the age of 21.

How do I know this? Maybe I'm one of his best friends or his parent. Maybe I'm his pastor or health care provider. I'm none of these things: I know this information because I went through every one of his searches over a period of time, was able to, thanks to America Online which dutifully recorded his search requests without his knowledge. I also know his name, his bizarre sexual kinks and a whole host of other extremely intimate facts about him that, if exposed, could be used to humiliate or blackmail him in the worst possible way.

After acquiring the AOL search data that the government and countless other agencies, corporations and private citizens now have, I have run just a few queries against logged searches and turned up the whole gamut of humanity. From boyfriends needing to know what it means when their girlfriends say they need more space to girlfriends needing to know what it means when, in their boyfriend's opinion, everything they do it wrong. Questions about Chinese peonies, ultimate frisbee or, even, how to make love.

But it doesn't stop there, of course. There are queries revealing extremely intimate problems, medical conditions, crimes (both how to stop and how to get away with), secrets of all sorts (referred to directly or indirectly) and most disturbingly the not-so-occasional real name, address, telephone or credit card or social security number that ties the information to a real human being.

And all entries, thanks to AOL, have a User ID which can then be searched for to pull up the entire polled searches for that user. Do a query for a keyword and once that word is spotted, focus on that user's entire search history (at least during the period AOL provided) to learn more.

But we all have secrets, don't we? Each of us, in some way, provide Search Engines with very private information which turn them into confessionals. Unintentional ones, but confessionals all the same. While it may be at first salacious to consider perusing the intimate details of others consider that we, all of us, have many things we wish to keep private. Whether it's genital warts on your vagina, the penis you wish to lengthen or the high school diploma you never got, all of these things are contained within your cloak of personal privacy. Or used to be.

Think for a moment, on those private matters you discuss only with loved ones...and the Oracle of the Search Engine.

Data mining is the process of sifting through enormous quantities of data. Previously, this was used primarily by advertising and marketing organizations to better-understand the potential consumers they wished to sell products to. However, this is not "previously", it's 2006. And the "Now" that we live in is filled with mega-corporations working hand in hand with questionable, at least, governmental organizations to identify individuals from a coalition of data from various sources. Sites like MySpace, YouTube , search engines and others gather a great deal of information about you and your friends, your relationships to your friends, their likes and dislikes, their banality as well as their shocking impropriety. That data, procured by the government, can be used as probable cause to make an arrest or search your home. The eagerness with which corporations are assisting The United States government to classify and identify you should be unnerving.

And they're getting better at it all the time.

I have been using the Internet (the Internet, not just computers) for about 18 years now. I have worked in the software industry or data analysis most of my adult life. I have come across few things that have given me as much reason for concern as I have in the last few years as huge amounts of information are casually stored in data-warehouses and then crunched, at leisure, by corporations, our government or other entities, unguessable. As the government and others find more and more elegant ways of crunching that data our rights to personal privacy begin to evaporate.

Protecting this private information should be in the forefront of your mind.

PB

Amazingly, all this data is still available for searching. This is the tiniest, palest sliver of the kind of datamining we're talking about the government using nowdays. If you don't think these kinds of intrusions into your privacy are disturbing, go play NSA for a few hours with the AOL database.

PB

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. The unstated message being rained down upon us is

that if you are a compliant prole and don't in any way threaten or annoy the 1%'ers, you can carry on with your miserable existence unmolested. The psychological effect of the current discussion about the complete loss of privacy is real and pervasive. In a macabre sort of way, I will be interested to see how the boundless human imagination will counter the total information awareness society that we now live in.

Cheers!

[Poll_Blind]

2. I think part of that response, to the "total information awareness" society, is...

...moving things back to meatspace, to "real life". The kind of tapping into what you do online has reached such epic proportions that, honestly, real life (at least in most places in America) is more "free".

That's my response, anyway. The internet used to mean more privacy than doing something in real life. Now it means quite a bit less.

PB