As concerns about the privacy of one's search engine history steadily increase, various solutions have been offered to help avoid the wholesale surveillance and aggregation of one's search queries. While most solutions rely on attempts to cloak one's IP address,…
Read More TrackMeNot Firefox Extension Obfuscates Your Search History
This San Jose Mercury News article summarizes the privacy and surveillance threats of search engines, focusing on the fact that much of the "massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the…
Read More What do Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s MSN know about you?
The Wall Street Journal has published a debate (well, an e-mail exchange) between Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Markham Erickson, a lobbyist for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo, on the topic of the…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides these tips to help keep your search history anonymous: How can you help prevent damaging privacy invasions like AOL's data leak? Along with spreading the word about this debacle, you can take steps to protect…
The Register warns that Amazon.com is planning to create the "world's biggest personal data stash." Their source is this Seattle Post Intelligencer report on the detailed patent application Amazon filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Amazon.com is developing…
Read More Amazon Plans “World’s Biggest Personal Data Stash”
From the EFF: AOL's data leak is a disaster, but there may be some silver lining. By putting the spotlight on the dangers of Internet companies storing massive amounts of private information, the data leak could spur better business practices…
Why was the AOL data dump wrong? "Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas," says Mary Hodder. She's right.
Declan McCullagh at CNet has posted many more, often disturbing, profiles of users gleaned from the AOL search data leak. Examples include: Based on the number of local searches, AOL user 1515830 appears to be a resident of [personal information…
It is not that hard to identity actual users from the "anonymous" search data released by AOL. The New York Times quickly found user No. 4417749: No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from…
Might AOL's release of the logs of nearly 20 million web searches documenting three months of activity by 650,000 AOL users serve to raise awareness of the privacy concerns with web search surveillance (that I've been writing about forever)? Seth…
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