Aral Balkan: Historical Archive — AOL releases 20,000,000 or so search queries by around 500,000 of its users

AOL releases 20,000,000 or so search queries by around 500,000 of its users

The shit appears to have hit the fan. I read about this on Digg and found that the blogosphere has exploded with commentary on the matter.

Techcrunch notes that the "utter stupidity of this is staggering." Elsewhere, people are calling for a boycott of AOL. Personally, I'm not the least bit surprised. I've been warning people off of AOL for years for various reasons.

Other links: Paradigm shift blog post, Will Video for Food blog post, screen capture of AOL Research site (the actual site is currently down), and, if you want to look at the data yourself, someone has set up a mirror.

Comments

oh my god! aol is at it again! what were they thinking when they released this data? that their customers will send them kisses and hugs? this is what happens when management in these so-called "face-less" corporations has no clue or listens to advice from people with no clue! how tragic,,,
by jlopes on 2006-08-07 15:53:04
[...] AOL, the wonderful company that they are, require any mail to be sent to them to be from a server with a valid reverse DNS lookup (ptr) record. If you’re finding emails bouncing back from AOL (and some others) make sure your mail server’s domain name server has an an appropriate ptr record setup. [...]
by Danny-T.co.uk » Blog Archive » Problems sending mails to AOL and similar on 2006-08-08 14:56:06
A site where you can search the data is here: http://www.datablunder.com/logitems/query/
by ty on 2006-08-12 16:05:03