What started as an update to my recent post on the AOL search data debacle has taken on a life of its own, so I’ve turned it into a new post.
I wrote a similar post for my “official” blog at globeandmail.com/blogs/geekwatch — in which I wondered why everyone was getting so upset about the AOL data leak, since privacy on the Internet is effectively non-existent anyway — and judging by the comments that post sparked, I seem (or AOL seems) to have struck a nerve when it comes to personal privacy and the Internet.
One reader mentioned the recent New York Times article about the AOL debacle, in which a journalist tracked down a woman living in a small town based on some of the searches she did, which included personal information such as the name of the town — and another reader didn’t think much of my counter-argument that this says more about the journalist and the newspaper that tracked her down than it does about AOL’s release of the data. Some readers also thought my comparison to Rogers releasing information about pay-per-view rentals was spurious, since that wouldn’t include personal data (and I admit it’s not a great analogy).
As I mentioned in my response to those comments, I realize that there is a lot of information included in what AOL released, and that by putting two and two together (as the NYT did) someone could come up with a pretty good idea of who did those searches. I guess the point I was trying to make is that much of that information is already out there, and is effectively publicly available. If you type in your name or address or credit card number, it can be tracked and accessed, and while it takes a little more effort and knowhow than sifting through AOL’s search data (Elliott Back helpfully describes how to do it here), it doesn’t take a whole lot more. Privacy of information on the Internet is not black and white — it is shades of grey. I guess that was my point.
Law professor and blogger Michael Geist, whose opinion I respect, says that I am wrong and that the AOL incident illustrates why such search data should not only not be released but shouldn’t even be kept. John Battelle says that he was secretly thrilled at the New York Times story because “the silver lining of a data leak like this is that it allows the culture to have a conversation about what we’re getting into here by tracking all this data.” I would agree. If you want to explore the issue further, there is some great discussion going on not just in the comment section of my Globe blog but also at Greg Linden’s and Jeff Nolan’s.