AOL recently released quite a lot of search queries that were "anonymized", in support of what appears to be a conference paper by some AOL researchers. Well, the anonymization was pretty trivial, they just changed user ids to numbers, but as those of us who obsessively search for our own names know, it would be pretty easy to figure out who someone is based on our search queries. And in fact, that is what has happened, for example, the New York Times took the data and identified a user.
So, AOL heads have rolled. Several people have lost their jobs at AOL, including the researcher who wrote the paper that used the data, and the superior who must have authorized the release of the data. Here's a story on the firings: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14455344/ And while AOL has withdrawn this data, you can still find it at various mirrors, including: http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/ The data is a bit less than 500 MB. Keep in mind too that Google refused a Department of Justice request for exactly this same sort of data, for exactly this same reason (it's really hard to anonymize search logs). You can find Google's response to the DOJ request here : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/response-to-doj-motion.html Thanks to John Moe for making me aware of all this. I hadn't been following this until he mentioned it to me. Enjoy, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
