Keep your cool

The aftermath - the release of search records by AOL

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

One more reason to avoid using AOL / Time Warner products. Sunday night AOL released web search data of 658,000 members. It is a list of 20 million search inquiries collected over a three-month period. The info is chock full of social security numbers, phone numbers, and the ususal "how to kill wife" searches....

You may be thinking what the big deal is about this. Well lets say hypothetically you are the mayor of a medium sized city and you have searched for a tracking number for a package headed to your house. This would easily allow someone to find out who you are. Then all of your search data can be mined to find anything offensive in it. The local paper does a story on it and you have a major embarrassment on your hands.

Here are some tools to search the data:

http://aoldb.unwieldy.net/
http://websearchdata.com/
http://dontdelete.com/ <---------- Has a random button that is fun to use.

http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/

AOL is now apologizing for the release calling it a "screw-up," which they're upset and angry about."

Isn't that nice of them that makes everything better.

**Update** AOL Executives Heads roll because of this.

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