untangling_the_web

DOCID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIEDhTOR OFFlelAL tis!: ONLY
Protect Yourself from Search Engine Leaks
In late July 2006, AOL published a list of 20 to 36 million search inquiries collected
over a three-month period that included identification numbers for 658,000 unnamed
users at their now defunct Research website . It didn't
take long for some fairly bright researchers to piece together some of the information
and come up with real people whose queries were released. This was possible
largely because AOL kept individual user's queries together in order to show the
pattern of a person's searches over a period of time. "Searches by individual users
are grouped together, often forming small profiles of a user's habits and interests.
The files include the date and time of each inquiry and the address of the Web site
the user chose to visit after searchtnq.F"
Why would AOL do such a thing in the first place? AOL's intention was to provide
useful data to researchers performing "search research." However, the data turned
out to be more "helpful" than AOL intended. If you think about it, how much effort
does it take to figure out a specific user's name and location if you have three
months of his or her searches? And since all the queries also included a date/time
stamp and the link to the site they visited from AOL, there are other ways a site
manager could use site logs to put together a profile on someone. What some truly
enterprising person or group could do with this data is limited only by their
imagination. Once the news came out that individuals could be identified from the
database, AOL took the data off its website, but of course it was too late. Sites
mirroring the database immediately popped up.
The lessons to be drawn from this episode are too many to name, but at the very
least we know that what we like to think of as privacy is largely an illusion and what
seems like an innocent act of "openness" and "sharing" can backfire in the worst
possible way. What can you do to protect yourself against disclosures such as the
one described above or from inadvertent leaks of search engine data? I have
repeatedly warned people about using search services that require you to log into
the site. AOL, Google. Live, and Yahoo all offer such services, which illustrate my
rule of thumb: anything that adds convenience brings with it some degradation of
privacy and/or security. The fact is that you are personally identifiable if you have
an account with a search engine site.
But what is the risk that you can be identified from your searches if you do not have
an account at a search site? In light of the AOL incident, Wired updated a January
2006 article on this topic, and some of the points they make are as follows:
216 Saul Hansell, "AOL Removes Search Data on Group of Web Users," New York Times, 8 August
2006, (archived article requires
payment).
UNCLASSIFIEDI.'r;eR OFFIelAL tiS! OICJL f 595