http://data.aolsearchlogs.com/log/random.cgi

via the comment from “Abbie Normal”

BTW, I agree with the earlier comments about how people shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on some searches. In some cases we really don’t have enough information to make much sense of just a few queries without much context.

Search data is arguably ‘traffic data’, i.e. data about network activities that isn’t itself directly tied to an identifed (n.b. not identifiable) individual, even though it may be possible to infer connections. E.g. it’s the difference between an IP number that may or may not be shared you and other customers of your ISP and your name and postal address which are uniquely yours.

Even in the EU, traffic data are afforded a much lower level of protection (even when they are tied directly to personally identifiable data such as a phone number and billing data) than are personal data.

Though there have been some recent developments on the treatment of traffic data in the EU which I really must get around to writing about…

Well yes but from a small number of searches you could triangulate. Only one person has connections with exactly that set of five people or institutions, etc…

My recollection is that the other companies (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) that had been approached by the US government also weren’t going to hand over any data with identifying information. (If I wasn’t rushing out the door I’d look up some references, sorry.)

brief point from the data protection point of view – this does not implicate European (and most other) DP laws as it is not personally identifiable data. It’s interesting, nonetheless.

I did the system administration for one of the early studies of user behaviour using log files, back in 1999. I don’t know if such a study could be done done, from viewpoint of the attacks it would get for using the data.

I suppose the only advice I can give on that point is to say think carefully about the career implications, though I believe going ahead with such studies would help establish they can produce useful results (though this is not advice to anyone to hurt themselves, pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs). Think: “So that the data have not been released in vain …”

Several people have noted the “kill my wife” search, but you wonder: could this have been a wannabe crime novelist? someone whose wife was already murdered by someone else? or an actual would-be murderer? I’m reminded of the Pete Townsend case (interesting that he was acquitted, no? would a non-famous, say, elementary school teacher have been?). There are just so many things to consider w/r/t to these things even after they’re out of the bag.

Meantime, you do wonder, at some point, whether any notion of “privacy” should go out the door altogether? Or at least certain forms of it? Wouldn’t airing out what we’re all REALLY like, en masse, do some social good? I’m thinking in particular of the bullshit campaign launched (and ongoing) by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, even in the face of obvious, and widespread, war crimes in Vietnam—and even where there were no war crimes, damned obvious horrors of war. Not only was Kerry defeated in no small part from this obvious lack of widespread insight into human nature, but a lot of the bullshit in Iraq would’ve been obvious to anyone with the slightest self-awareness and a little honest human experience. That is, if you’re really open to what humans are like (Goethe on the “crime imagined” is good here), you just shouldn’t be surprised at rapes, mutilations, mass murders, beheadings, etcetera: they’re part of who we are as a species & as such, unavoidable—especially in times/places of war. Is it better that we know that (if not, per AOL’s scrambling of user names, which) people search/think certain things with whatever degree of frequency?

I know, I know… there’s the Scylla of the Scarlet Letter that inheres in a real global village… and the Charybdis of Big Brother which is actual the Big Evil Twins of States and Corporations. But don’t we all already have a kind of social punchcard consisting of our education levels (and grades), credit reports, police records, property records, etcetera? If the job/house/school/life you can lead is already nearly inexorably determined for you in the private confines of admissions committees, HR departments, and banks… what’s a dirty thought or two aired to the public?