Augury

This is too much.

Stories like this are getting all too frequent — And these aren’t even attacks. These are just companies or governments treating private records of customers’ or citizens’ actions lightly. What happens when actual malicious users go after this sort of information? The sad thing is that we can’t even have a public discussion on the issue because we have permitted the culture-at-large to remain technologically inept to the point that they don’t see the importance of the issue. Is it really right for private companies to maintain enough tracking data on their customers that, if stitched together, you could see their entire lives? Lets take bets on whether this issue gets even a fraction of the coverage that the NSA programs did earlier this year.

It’s time to get serious about privacy. AOL leaked this information and now they should have to pay the price. Class action lawsuit? Federal fines? Lets go. Sure, a class action lawsuit wouldn’t do a damned thing to help the people whose privacy has been compromised by this action, but it’d punish the hell out of AOL. Whenever a company blunders like this it needs to be the last thing they do.

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The entirety of the data (roughly 500 MB) is available online. I haven’t made an attempt to get it myself as I’m conflicted about whether it’s appropriate to be disseminating such information — It’s not tough to find if you’re curious. Some more thoughts on whether we should metaphorically avert our eyes by Alex.

The Plenty of Fish weblog reveals some very concerning searches conducted by one AOL user. (Plenty of Fish is actually a dating site, so I have no idea why this guy is writing about it.) Makes you wonder what impression others could draw from your own searches if exposed in a similar way. Especially as a fiction writer and a naturally inquisitive person I’m certain I’ve searched some dubious terms over the years. Still, it’s hard to see the alternate potential explanations when you’ve got someone looking up, “killing your wife” and “steak and cheese” (Steak and Cheese is presumably a repository of images of corpses and the like, although I have no interest in validating the claims).