You never had privacy anyway

At seven in the morning, anyway, it’s looking like AOL is about to be crucified for its release of huge amounts of (barely) anonymized user search data. I’ve downloaded the data from a handy mirror and, yep, it’s about as personal as you could get. A woman searching for how long hash stays in her system, followed by information on her ovarian cyst. A teen in a small Texas town looking for jobs for people with no work experience, plus-sized prom dresses, and colleges that accept students with bad grades. The usual glut of potentially marriage-destroying searches for ‘itty bitty titties’ and the like. I can’t wait to get this stuff in a MySQL database – I’ve got to tear myself away, or I’ll be late for work. Aside from the voyeur factor, this data is pure money.

Back to the already-in-progress AOL beatdown – yes, this is a painfully-abrupt shattering of expectations of privacy on the Internet. But expectations of privacy online are utterly unrealistic and delusional anyway. Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you. You should assume that someday your entire search history (and/or your full browser history) will someday be made available to everybody, complete with easy-to-search interface. I’m not entirely certain that’ll happen – but you shouldn’t be shocked if it does.

It would be a shame if, in the aftermath of all this, the public became gunshy of all the tools in development that record gestures and attention online for the benefit of the user, while we keep the status quo of ISP data sales, government subpoenas, spy/ad/malware, and increasingly intrusive ‘behavioral targeting,’ all complementing routine sales of personally-identifiable information from the major credit bureaus.

UPDATE: Instructions on getting the AOL data in a usable format are here.