In the summer of 2006, a large
Internet search provider released the web searches of approximately 650,000
users??”every search query that the users made from March to May. As a courtesy,
the company removed the names from the search and substituted in numbers
instead. Looks good on the surface, right? Not so much. Within minutes of
the data being posted, it was downloaded, mirrored, and shared across the
Internet. To this day, a quick search will reveal cached copies of the database.
The trouble??”as the company found out??”is that you could personally identify
many individuals by what they searched for??”the New York Times proved precisely
that by tracking down an individual from the data. Armed with credit card
numbers, Social Security Numbers, addresses, names, and a virtually an unlimited
supply of contextual data, both researchers and the less-virtuous identity
thieves went to work on the data, delving into the deep dark secrets of those
users.
Aside from the rather disturbing queries??”which shocked many columnists and
spurred a web contest to ?¬?nd the scariest search??”users began to fear the power
search engines hold. How can a user trust these companies with the sheer magnitude
of data they control? A quick tapping on a keyboard in an of?¬?ce somewhere
in Silicon Valley, and suddenly every search you ever performed is
released to the world.
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