[gthotchkiss]

Talk about a breach of privacy....

Data release continues to haunt AOL
N.Y. Times identifies Lilburn woman through her searches

By GEORGE CHIDI
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/11/06
With all the folks from Fox News, "Good Morning America" and heaven-knows where else calling Thelma Arnold's house and knocking on her door, she's feeling a little overwhelmed.
Arnold said she hadn't expected to become the poster grandmother of an Internet privacy debate when she answered a call from a New York Times reporter Tuesday.

ERIK S. LESSER/New York Times

But Arnold may be the first person identified from anonymous search data released by America Online last week, a breach of confidentiality that has infuriated both privacy advocates and the company's own leaders.
Arnold, like millions of AOL subscribers, uses the Internet to search for information, such as medical advice for friends or home sales in her Lilburn subdivision. AOL released two months of her searches, along with the searches of hundreds of thousands of other subscribers.
The company stripped her name from the file with her searches, assigning it a random number. But the Times was able to figure out who she was anyway, just by looking at the things she had been searching for online.
She thought her Web searches had been private, but with the Times calling, she realized they had just become very public.
Now the 62-year-old widow from Lilburn is bracing herself for more calls.
"I feel like a pioneer," she said. "Or a woman in front of a firing squad."
She said she talked to the press at first to make a point about how AOL's data release could threaten other people's privacy as well. "I was devastated, shocked ... and then I felt anger," Arnold said. "It's like someone going into your mailbox, looking at your mail and putting it back. If someone did that, they would go to jail."
Everyone isn't as easily identifiable as Arnold was, said David Gallagher, an assistant technology editor at the Times. In her case, Gallagher was able to match her son's last name in one of her searches with the name of her street in another. Gallagher saw that Arnold had searched for home sales in a particular Lilburn subdivision. When he looked in an online phone book for people with the last name Arnold living in Lilburn, Ga., he saw that one of the 11 people listed lived on a street with the same name as the subdivision she had searched.
"With a lot of them, it's not obvious," Gallagher said. "If you knew something about the person already, it might be easier."
The Times ran the story on its front page Wednesday. A local producer from "Good Morning America" came knocking on her door that afternoon. Fox News called her house, as did other publications, Arnold said.
It seemed like a good time to get out of Lilburn, she said. Arnold unplugged her phone and spent Wednesday with a friend. Thursday, she holed up at home with her three little dogs, Dudley, Josie, and Simon, waiting out the media storm. She's up to 15 calls in the past two days, including one from AOL's chief executive officer, Jon Miller. She took that one. He apologized.
AOL posted two months of Web searches from a random selection of 658,000 subscribers on the com pany's research site on July 31. Researchers releasing the data didn't consult AOL's internal privacy guardians before posting the 2-gigabyte file on the site, said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman. A handful of bloggers discovered the file Sunday, he said. By the time the company pulled the file on Sunday, it was too late — computer researchers, hackers and who-knows-who-else had already downloaded the data.
Web sites began popping up that allowed people to download the files themselves. The file had been turned into a BitTorrent — a file-sharing system allowing wide distribution of data. Some Web sites had even set up databases that allowed site visitors to search the searches. The damage was done.
"There's no way to put the genie back in the bottle," Weinstein said. The company is investigating the data release, but it would be pointless for AOL to demand that people stop using the data, he said. "As the recording industry will tell you, BitTorrent is unrestrainable."
The data release galvanized privacy advocates around the country.
Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, advocates changing privacy law so Internet searches carry the same legal protection from disclosure as e-mail.
Bankston cited one AOL user's searches, which would lead an observer to guess that the subscriber might be a lesbian living in Los Angeles with an interest in motorized sex toys, movie theaters in
Koreatown and the health benefits of vinegar. One search term appears to be a Social Security number.
"I think the privacy risk is self-evident," Bankston said. "The only responsible thing to do is for them to not keep this data. ... AOL's disclosure here could open them up to civil liability."
Arnold said she isn't interested in suing AOL. But she's expecting the next wave of calls to be from lawyers. She's screening her calls.
"Just don't tell anyone my e-mail address," she said.

[navydevildoc]

Original Thread

Not much discussion on that one anyway.

Yeah, AOL is on the ropes. Lets see how long they hang around, even as a part of Time Warner.

[jaim]

Now that is f'ed up. I would like to know why, "AOL posted two months of Web searches from a random selection of 658,000 subscribers on the com pany's research site on July 31." Where they doing a dry run for the DHS?