I noticed they warn users that the database has not be censored of sexually explicit search terms. But what about personally- identifiable search terms? Someone concerned about whether their personal information is online might search for "Michael Zimmer xxx- xx-xxxx" with their social security number. Or how about personally embarrassing searches, such as "Michael Zimmer nude karaoke"? The presence of such searches in a public database is problematic. -m ----- Michael T. Zimmer Doctoral Candidate, Culture and Communication, New York University Student Fellow, Information Law Institute, NYU Law School e: michael.zimmer@nyu.edu w: http://michaelzimmer.org On Aug 7, 2006, at 6:27 AM, Maciej Kos wrote:
This may be useful to some of us.
"AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May (2006) is now public information on the internet."
"Update: Seems like AOL took it down. There are some mirrors of the data in the comments of the digg story, linked below. I estimate about 1000 people have the file, so it's definitely going to be circulated around. The main AOL research page is still up, with some other data collections. The google cache of the download page is still up, but you can't get the data."
"500k User Session Collection ---------------------------------------------- This collection is distributed for NON-COMMERCIAL RESEARCH USE ONLY. Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Brief description:
This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months. The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged. "
http download http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php? action=download&ufid=DDD1D4D0017BB5BE
Torrent http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3510027 http://www.mininova.org/tor/388815
AOL website´s cache: http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:2Qvd2z9VbuIJ:research.aol.com/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php%3Fn%3DResearch.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months +&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
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