A commenter over at Techcrunch put together a simple little web interface to the AOL search data.
Michael Arrington from Techcrunch spoke with Andrew Weinstein over the phone lastnight about this. Andrew is the AOL employee who first issued the apology that can be seen over at Techcrunch. Anyway, Michael thinks Andrew is truly pissed off about what happened, as he definitely should be.
What I’d like to know, is how the decision came about to release this data in the first place. This had to be a decision made from pretty high up the ladder. Another thing, AOL shouldn’t even allow access to this data in it’s raw format. Or, very, very few people should be able to access the raw data, except for a few servers. I mean, nobody at AOL should have any reason to use such detailed data. Instead, there should be a reporting type system that runs reports based on the raw search data, that way nobody can actually see the data itself, only the summarized reports.
I don’t think Jason’s idea of turning off logging is practical. It’s really quite simple, don’t allow access to the raw log data.
Philipp Lenssen has some pretty good commentary over at Google Blogoscoped. He’s taken some time to see what individuals are searching for, pretty amusing:
At 10:08 PM, 28963 looks for “porn sites”. 28963 quickly amends the search query to read “freee porn sites”. (Two days later, 28963 shows a sudden interest in genital warts.)
He’s got a lot more of them, so head over to Google Blogoscoped for more amusement. Garett Rogers at the Googling Google blog at ZDnet has some commentary too.
This is the type of news that will reach every single AOL user. People will be boycotting the company because of their blatent disregard for the privacy of users. As my fellow Canadians would understand — this could be the TSN turning point.
Markus Frind has put together nice post detailing how one AOL user likes searching for ways to commit murder. Some of his commenter’s are upset, but Markus asks some good questions:
Users in the comments are pissed off at the idea that people can be arrested for planning a crime like murder, calling it minority report like. I ask you why is it that americans have no problems arresting people that are planning or researching how to conduct terrorist attacks? Yet if a person plans on killing his wife that is ok, until he actually does it? How many people do you have to plan on killing before its ok for a company like AOL to hand your records over to the government? I am not taking sides, I’m just pointing out the obvious double standard. This story will open a can of worms, and will decide just how private your data online really is.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Lots Of Spam
I think this blog gets way more spam than your average blog. For instance, over the lifetime of this blog (a little over 4 years), it averages about 95 unique visitors per day. Pretty poor average, I know, but this blog existed for 2+ years being read only by my family. Over the last year and a half or so, my averages have been up around 150 - 200 uniques per day.
Now, comment spam wasn’t a huge deal here until about a year ago or so. When it became a real problem, I installed Spam Karma, which has stopped pretty much all of it. How many pieces of comment spam does “all of it” equal? Right about 60,000 comment spams, in nearly one year. See the little black bar at the bottom of this page? It counts the number of comment spams that Spam Karma has stopped. It currently reads “This blog is protected by Spam Karma 2: 62528 Spams eaten and counting…”.
It’ll be at 62700 or so by tomorrow morning probably. Maybe I’m way off, but I just think this is an awful lot of comment spam compared to the relatively low amount of “real” traffic this site sees. But whatever, I’m just glad to have Spam Karma.
Popularity: 3% [?]