Ancient satire foretold AOL's privacy disaster

Igor, to the machines! We have a sample...

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 10th August 2006 01:40 GMT

Webcast: Building Applications for the 21st Century

"The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population" - Joi Ito

One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL's careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet's "hive mind" at play this week.

AOL's assiduous documentation of the private thoughts of over 600,000 web searchers has certainly added some much needed sparkle to a public internet that of late, has been in dire need of a tonic. Now, internet users' most private thoughts are revealed, in all their banality and creepiness, and we must count ourselves fortunate.

"AOL's data sketch sometimes scary picture of personalities searching Net," was the headline USA Today newspaper chose, but this barely conveyed the voyeuristic frisson, or glee we felt as the AOL database made its way across the net.

Nothing in recent months has made the net come alive quite like these queries, and it's not hard to see why. Recently, the net has been drowning in banality. Billions of identical blogs - some human generated, some machine generated - spring up every day, with identical opinions to match the identical templates each blog hoster seems to provide. This outpouring of new recorded writing has been trumpeted as a new era in human expression. But the truth is, in practice, the consequence of all this is that it's getting increasingly difficult to tell which is which. Human, or machine?

As you'll know if you've checked your email recently, the spam-generating robots, programmed to defy Bayesian filters, have become ever more creative. At the same time, the much-heralded blog army - often soccer moms who on approaching a QWERTY keyboard realize that what needs to be said, is better said elsewhere - have done little more than post pictures of cats and sunsets, good luck charms cast into the void. That's a sweet and delightful thing to do under the circumstances, but it isn't an enormous contribution to human well being, the reconfiguring of society that technology evangelists say is happening now. Or any second now.So it's nice to have some real human input for a change.

Snorer sufferers... Scar-worrying Mormons ... Adulterers and Adulteresses ... Wife-murderers ... welcome on board, and H-ello!

But back to business, and let's focus on an aspect lost in the "scandal". The thing that everyone has overlooked is that this wasn't an accidental or negligent data loss by AOL. The search query data was sincerely released in the name of science.

Boffins at AOL Labs published the data for boffins at similar "labs" to peruse.

That's strange enough in itself, and it should make you yearn for white-coated frontiersmen of yore. Things have changed a bit since then and now.

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