http://www.frogspy.com

You made a mistake, no big deal, time to both get over it. (Great reading though–not too often blog authors go public with their battles, with words volleying back and forth across websites. Almost like watching tennis.)

I wouldn’t directly link to the AOL files because I don’t want to be responsible for the loss of privacy of their mostly unaware customers. That would lay on my conscience most uncomfortably.

On the other hand there’s hundreds of mirrors and a site that lets you view the files so the damage is done, and one more well-known blogger here and there hotlinking to it isn’t going to make much difference. Its not your fault this info is available–its AOL’s, for being stupid enough to release it in the first place.

I think its a horrible invasion of privacy for their members. I’ve read comments from blogs all over the Web saying, “Privacy is non-existent on the Web, anyway–get used to it.” I don’t think that needs to be true.

If search engines and ISPs didn’t keep thorough records of people’s online activities our expectation of privacy and anonymity would be much greater. No one wants this sort of information out there for everyone to look at, except people who plan on using the data to benefit their SEO practices, and people who are just plain nosy or determined to find out about one or more people using the info AOL so carelessly provided.

There is no “good” use for it, Ben–sorry. But since it will always be easily available online from now through Eternity, you are, as I said, not adding much more to the damage AOL has done.

I’ve noticed talk about this fiasco wandering thanks in large part to sites like http://plentyoffish.com into how to figure out if some guy means to kill his wife, how much porn people really look at, etc, with the discussion on his site becoming quite involved and lively.

I wish he’d never mentioned the “guy killing his wife” part because he distracts from the real issue: what those data sets contain is deeply personal to each member of AOL. Its none of our business what members searched for, who they are, what they’ve got planned, what they buy, where they live, what their credit card # or SS # is.

The fact that AOL released that inforamtion to the public doesn’t and never will *make* it our business.

What AOL did is morally wrong, a complete invasion of member privacy and absolutely reprehensible from every angle, including the fact that as plentyoffish says, correctly, “Google’s gonna get mega-spammed.” With a goldmine of search engine information like that, what else would SEO masters do with it?

It will be interseting, to say the least, to see how this affects more highly prized Adwords–will some of them be considered overvalued after studying this data? Will some cheaper
Adwords actually prove to be a better buy? If so, they’ll be snatched up while Google’s price is still low, and the higher-priced ones that don’t do as well based on these data sets will slowly fall by the wayside, so that Google will be forced to lower prices for them.

I’m sure one thing Goolge never expected any company or person to do (much less AOL, who they have an ad and SEO partnership with) is give away their trade secrets to the public for free. If I were them I’d be pissed.

Some sympathy for the other side (members of AOL who are mostly clueless that this has happened and what it means) is needed now.

It could be *your* searches analyzed by the general public, the United States government and webmasters eager to market to you. *Your* name, credit card and SS # and search details now known to the world. Your most private online moments digested and interpreted by everybody. Doesn’t that sound embarassing? If those search records don’t include you, be grateful that you don’t use AOL, but think of *their* members–too ignorant to even know what’s going on–being researched, made fun of and snooped on as we speak.

There’s a saying, “Treat your neighbor as you want to be treated,” and another, “The Web connects us all to each other–like a global community.” If everyone on the Web is part of a global community, then we’re neighbors who aren’t treating each other too well if we tolerate privacy invasions like this. Benefiting from them is another step down a slippery slope that will make the Web so fraught with privacy invasions that no one will think its worth bothering with anymore.

This is exactly the wake up call that the new high speed internet generation needs. Their information is very personal and will portray a portrait of each user that is more distorted than if they appeared on a reality TV show. The info is out there, it is never well protected and the government is getting reams of it without suing Google for it. Remember the stink with Google was that they refused, and that is the only reason we heard about it!

I think the release is part of a long term strategy and not an F’up. Someone was counting on both the exposure for AOL and that the data would instantly be linked all over the internet and therefore in Ben’s world part of the ‘public domain’.

Whatever the motivation for this I bet the fallout will be that American’s loose more personal freedom over it and the internet shifts farther to the corporate than the community side of the online world. Not insinuating the corporate side is the dark side – just the “not the in people’s best interest side”.

If this were boxing: we are all looking at the jab and not seeing the knock out coming.

BTW: Sad to see so much sexual tension between to male personas (Ben and Ian) on a blog, you two should get together, do the nasty and get over it. Or are you already together and just playing it this way on the blog for attention? Hmm, that’s genius, really.

I don’t think it’s a corporate mindset that says ‘don’t hurt real people in the pursuit of an agenda’. I think it’s very much a non-corporate position. Berate AOL by all means, rip them to shreds if you want. But I’m afraid I think you’re dressing up irresponsibility as radicalism, which is sort of the definition of not being a grown-up.

On the AOL front, in what way are you “supporting positive uses of the data”? Reposting isn’t supporting positive use: doing something with the data that was positive yourself as an example for others would be “supporting positive uses”. Simply reposting is exactly that: reposting. It’s at best ethically neutral, and at worst irresponsible.

It’s also gesture politics, because as you and I both know, that data is only ever going to be a Google search away now. So again: what’s the point of what you’re doing? What’s the overall effect of it, other than to bolster your ego?

“The obvious, mainstream, corporate line: ‘let’s suppress it’ and the alternative, think outside the box: ‘the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no going back, so let’s see what we can do with it now it’s there’.”

turn it around and turn a cockup into something good.
Just what I dont know, but i’ve been making graphs in asp all day so can only see pie charts