AOL just released information about 20 million web queries from 650,000 users. They just changed usernames into random strings, but they kept user-data association. Techcrunch makes privacy implications very clear.
[UPDATE: AOL links to search data are down. I suppose P2P will help now.]
Blogs are buzzing, AOL users are getting very disappointed, as spotting real users’ identities analyzing search patterns is absolutely simple; and marketers smell money as they analyze AOL data, which will turn into a golden mine, providing best (and most prized) advertising keywords.
Surely this will become a hot topic in the next hours…anyway, still remains the question: why did AOL do this?
[FOLLOW-UP: AOL data leak: consequences and opinions]
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