6 ms·

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 (2006)

135 points by acqbu 3y ago

elzbardico 3y ago
2006... If they only knew....
- rvnx 3y ago
  Now people create accounts to get their searches directly tied to their profile
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    Like that new search engine that's better than googly?
    - alwa 3y ago
      You mean Kagi? They’re pretty transparent about how they approach query data, and it’s as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen. https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
      - warkdarrior 3y ago
        > Kagi [...] [is] as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen For now
      - _njyk 3y ago
        No, I wasn't referring to Kagi (which is done by a hard-working guy btw), just in general to the trend that the internet is now completely different if seen from a perspective of 2006. Storage was expensive, and data wasn't seen as a goldmine as now, so most long-term logs went to /dev/null. That the normality now is to ask users to create an account, have data-scientists (whose goal is precisely to find needles in haystacks), etc.
    - piperswe 3y ago
      Kagi makes it very clear in their privacy policy and in their settings that search queries are not saved. If they save them regardless, that's a clear cut violation of the law. From their settings page: > Save My Search History > Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any > searches by default. In the future we may add features that will > utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this. It sure seems like it will always be opt-in, even if they add query saving in the future.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
        A violation... of which law?
        piperswe 3y ago
        The FTC enforces (or at least claims to) against companies with misleading privacy policies.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      On tons of search engines and AI services, you are nudged or required to have an account (which forces you to de-anonymize yourself and/or link your activity to a specific account). 20 years ago, when this leak happened, the situation wasn't like that. Gmail was barely born, so Google accounts didn't make sense. The article was like "wow we managed to deanonymize a search query", but that's actually the norm now. Essentially, this scandalous AOL-leak, became a legitimized every-day routine (sadly). Today when you type anything inside a ChatGPT-like AI app (this is the case also for many search engines), you get tons of contractors, workers and partners who have access to such dataset: researchers, engineers, support, advertising platforms, technical intermediaries, legal, etc. Though the future isn't gloomy; in the short-term, with the advent of LLMs, we may actually see a really good solution private-wise: fully local answers. Which means that for the first time, queries and questions may not leave the device or sent to whoever you need to trust.
acqbu 3y ago
https://archive.is/sfAMv https://archive.is/sfAMv
- kleiba 3y ago
  Couldn't this functionality be automized somehow? Every time there's a link on HN to a paywalled article, I have to the same dance: 1. Click on the link 2. Find out it's behind a paywall 3. Go back in the browser 4. Click on the "comments" link. 5. Look for the post that has the archive.is version of it. 6. Click on that. Surely that could somehow be collapsed into just a single click?
  - hoherd 3y ago
    Open the current page in archive.li: javascript:(function()%7B%0A%20window.location%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Farchive.li%2F%22%20%2B%20window.location%3B%0A%7D)()
  - rsaarelm 3y ago
    You can go in the browser URL field and type "archive.is/" in front of the URL and press enter after step 2. It'll either redirect you to an existing archive page or lets you create one if one doesn't exist.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      For some reason it isn't loading for me, but if you use a search engine that supports bangs in your URL bar (DDG or Kagi) you can prefix the url with !ais and just search that. Same with !wbm or !ia for Wayback Machine
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I get good use out of this browser extension: https://github.com/arantius/resurrect-pages https://github.com/arantius/resurrect-pages Sites are usually archived already.
  - danjc 3y ago
    It cant be a first party feature.
DicIfTEx 3y ago
There was also a theatre production produced around AOL User 927: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/05/uare-what-u-seek-new-play-sparked-by-search-queries/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/05/uare-what-u-se... And a documentary series about User 711391: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1455044/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1455044/
samwillis 3y ago
This is important to look back on in the context of what's happing now with AI tools. This story is obviously about the leak of the data publicly, but what it shows is the profiling that is available to corporations. Search has exposed so much data about ourselves to the services we use with very little regulation on what they are permitted to do with it inside their own walls. My fear with AI is that we are moving toward sending even more data to party services. Tools such a co-pilot (which I enjoy using) are a gold mine for behavioural analysis. The profiling that will be possible with these tools is extraordinary and we don't yet fully understand the implication. It's because of this that I'm a massive proponent of "Local AI". We need to be pushing for the industry to adopt a local inference architecture asap. It needs to become the standard pattern as early as possible to reduce the risk of the AI revolution being a repeat of the invasive internet search and advertising industry.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  The issue with AI is that people are going to be creating work product with it, and it doesn't require the extensive infrastructure that search has. Google knows alot about your behavior - they can and have been able to correlate online behavior with health and meatspace actions to identify budding extremists or people at risk of addiction, etc. AI will bring that capability to business processes. With the number of little companies that are springing up, it will become much easier for outside parties to figure out how instituions work. This capability exists, but it's gated by Google and Microsoft and they have drawn lines to protect the overall business. Some jackass will install a creepy AI tool to scrape outlook and salesguys will be able to get a profile of who makes what decision in a company, for example.
  - dartos 3y ago
    AI does take a ton of infrastructure. You need data collection and curation. Massive amounts of training hardware. And a large infrastructure to ensure you can scale. No easy feat with the current GPU stack.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jll29 3y ago
That episode (releasing the AOL search query log file for research purposes and subsequent aftermath) led to some firings at the company, but some information retrieval searchers used this log to conduct important experiments. The "60s lady with the dog that kept peeing her sofa" got her hour of fame, and the whole thing became a case study in de-anonymization. A few pointers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233390862_Privacy_Preserving_Web_Query_Log_Publishing_A_Survey_on_AnonymizationTechniques https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233390862_Privacy_P... https://github.com/wasiahmad/aol_query_log_analysis https://github.com/wasiahmad/aol_query_log_analysis https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/08/15/100592/who-benefits-from-aols-released-search-logs/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/08/15/100592/who-benef... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020025509000516 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00200... https://isquared.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/mining-search-logs-for-usage-patterns/ https://isquared.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/mining-search-logs...
- Lammy 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20131016001916/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131016001916/http://www.someth... https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124159/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124159/http://www.someth... https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124204/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log-3 https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124204/http://www.someth... ------------------------------------ https://web.archive.org/web/20131024112051im_/http://i.somethingawful.com//sasbi/2006/08/docevil/8-13-06_27.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20131024112051im_/http://i.somet... https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/23/san-jose-man-convicted-31-years-after-sadistic-rape-murder/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/23/san-jose-man-convicte...
karaterobot 3y ago
Re-identification of supposedly anonymous data was a problem twenty years ago, and is a bigger problem today. Soon it may become a crisis, as the tools needed to do it become more and more turnkey, effective, and commodified. Now we dox as in a glass, darkly, etc.
- mmvasq 3y ago
  This data is already "re-identified" by some somebodies. And complete intent to harm over a course of 5 years proven out. I have evidence, lots of it. The individuals initially affected by the search leak need to be notified by a representative of AOL and probably SOE. Time to stop the dark patterns of attribution games and ready the individuals for what is to come. If I had been caught alone, I probably would have not made it through the harassment that came from the people that have re-identified the data.
  - mmvasq 3y ago
    Have three identities confirmed - yet the individuals doing the harassment all know best evidence has to come from law enforcement and the logs - not my screenshots. It's part of the game they play with the data.
neonate 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20170715075814/https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170715075814/https://www.nytim...
zx8080 3y ago
There's one thing could work, but which would be very hard or impossible to implement: management personal responsibility for private data loss/exposure.
mortallywounded 3y ago
Maybe some day we'll have a PIR-based[1] search engine-- but then you couldn't harvest data on your users and sell personalized ads, so maybe not. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval
mmvasq 3y ago
My data is in this list someone used for "research". They evidently correlated with Sony Everquest Chats, LinkedIn, Twitter, AOL, corporate email, Meta, Amazon Purchases, Natural Language Processing Data collections, some DFIR (digital forensics) data collection, HR records and so much more. I would say at the time they collected the info I was planning renaissance fest attire, studying security topics and frantically figuring out identities of some gamers who dogpiled on me as a few made genuine threats towards my life and livelihood. I'd say yes, throw disinformation at at, as once I started noticing someone was really doing that level of tracking I did throw disinfo at it... a lot. The problem was with their interpretations from there of searches intentionally made to mess them up - as I neither had consent yet realized I was being stalked. That went on and on and on - until people died - my father thought I was swatting him (I had a welfare check made - not a swat - as they were disclosing his financial advisor and info - he's white and safe presumably) . Yet yes, people did die. It is evident no one understands it is never just them in research or in a channel for conversations. The result of the whole thing was my childhood best friend also being left homeless and run over (by someone opportunistic in the whole process). My brother de-housed by a gang member a party kept sending about (one actually poisoned my dog). My father alienated. My sister used as a puppet for extortion instead of being rehabbed. It's very very very ugly the string of deaths and alienation that came from what they thought was funny research into AI. This old data needs to be located and disposed of or put into proper custodianship. It's grown teeth that cost lives. Throwing misinfo at it is just crapping up the Internet more to push to web 3.0, where the same problem will thrive. Requires legislation. Not quite relaxed enough to articulate how and what right now due to the extensive harassment that came about from it all. Maybe some day. It's been pretty terrorizing.
- neverrroot 3y ago
  I'm trying to learn more about what disinformation is, could you please post your thoughts under the following Ask HN post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369

135 points by acqbu 3y ago

elzbardico 3y ago

2006... If they only knew....

rvnx 3y ago
Now people create accounts to get their searches directly tied to their profile
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  Like that new search engine that's better than googly?
  - alwa 3y ago
    You mean Kagi? They’re pretty transparent about how they approach query data, and it’s as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen. https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy
    - warkdarrior 3y ago
      > Kagi [...] [is] as privacy-friendly as any I’ve seen For now
    - _njyk 3y ago
      No, I wasn't referring to Kagi (which is done by a hard-working guy btw), just in general to the trend that the internet is now completely different if seen from a perspective of 2006. Storage was expensive, and data wasn't seen as a goldmine as now, so most long-term logs went to /dev/null. That the normality now is to ask users to create an account, have data-scientists (whose goal is precisely to find needles in haystacks), etc.
  - piperswe 3y ago
    Kagi makes it very clear in their privacy policy and in their settings that search queries are not saved. If they save them regardless, that's a clear cut violation of the law. From their settings page: > Save My Search History > Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any > searches by default. In the future we may add features that will > utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this. It sure seems like it will always be opt-in, even if they add query saving in the future.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      A violation... of which law?
      - piperswe 3y ago
        The FTC enforces (or at least claims to) against companies with misleading privacy policies.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    On tons of search engines and AI services, you are nudged or required to have an account (which forces you to de-anonymize yourself and/or link your activity to a specific account). 20 years ago, when this leak happened, the situation wasn't like that. Gmail was barely born, so Google accounts didn't make sense. The article was like "wow we managed to deanonymize a search query", but that's actually the norm now. Essentially, this scandalous AOL-leak, became a legitimized every-day routine (sadly). Today when you type anything inside a ChatGPT-like AI app (this is the case also for many search engines), you get tons of contractors, workers and partners who have access to such dataset: researchers, engineers, support, advertising platforms, technical intermediaries, legal, etc. Though the future isn't gloomy; in the short-term, with the advent of LLMs, we may actually see a really good solution private-wise: fully local answers. Which means that for the first time, queries and questions may not leave the device or sent to whoever you need to trust.

acqbu 3y ago

https://archive.is/sfAMv https://archive.is/sfAMv

kleiba 3y ago
Couldn't this functionality be automized somehow? Every time there's a link on HN to a paywalled article, I have to the same dance: 1. Click on the link 2. Find out it's behind a paywall 3. Go back in the browser 4. Click on the "comments" link. 5. Look for the post that has the archive.is version of it. 6. Click on that. Surely that could somehow be collapsed into just a single click?
- hoherd 3y ago
  Open the current page in archive.li: javascript:(function()%7B%0A%20window.location%20%3D%20%22https%3A%2F%2Farchive.li%2F%22%20%2B%20window.location%3B%0A%7D)()
- rsaarelm 3y ago
  You can go in the browser URL field and type "archive.is/" in front of the URL and press enter after step 2. It'll either redirect you to an existing archive page or lets you create one if one doesn't exist.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    For some reason it isn't loading for me, but if you use a search engine that supports bangs in your URL bar (DDG or Kagi) you can prefix the url with !ais and just search that. Same with !wbm or !ia for Wayback Machine
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I get good use out of this browser extension: https://github.com/arantius/resurrect-pages https://github.com/arantius/resurrect-pages Sites are usually archived already.
- danjc 3y ago
  It cant be a first party feature.

DicIfTEx 3y ago

There was also a theatre production produced around AOL User 927: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/05/uare-what-u-seek-new-play-sparked-by-search-queries/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/05/uare-what-u-se... And a documentary series about User 711391: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1455044/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1455044/

samwillis 3y ago

This is important to look back on in the context of what's happing now with AI tools. This story is obviously about the leak of the data publicly, but what it shows is the profiling that is available to corporations. Search has exposed so much data about ourselves to the services we use with very little regulation on what they are permitted to do with it inside their own walls. My fear with AI is that we are moving toward sending even more data to party services. Tools such a co-pilot (which I enjoy using) are a gold mine for behavioural analysis. The profiling that will be possible with these tools is extraordinary and we don't yet fully understand the implication. It's because of this that I'm a massive proponent of "Local AI". We need to be pushing for the industry to adopt a local inference architecture asap. It needs to become the standard pattern as early as possible to reduce the risk of the AI revolution being a repeat of the invasive internet search and advertising industry.

Spooky23 3y ago
The issue with AI is that people are going to be creating work product with it, and it doesn't require the extensive infrastructure that search has. Google knows alot about your behavior - they can and have been able to correlate online behavior with health and meatspace actions to identify budding extremists or people at risk of addiction, etc. AI will bring that capability to business processes. With the number of little companies that are springing up, it will become much easier for outside parties to figure out how instituions work. This capability exists, but it's gated by Google and Microsoft and they have drawn lines to protect the overall business. Some jackass will install a creepy AI tool to scrape outlook and salesguys will be able to get a profile of who makes what decision in a company, for example.
- dartos 3y ago
  AI does take a ton of infrastructure. You need data collection and curation. Massive amounts of training hardware. And a large infrastructure to ensure you can scale. No easy feat with the current GPU stack.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jll29 3y ago

That episode (releasing the AOL search query log file for research purposes and subsequent aftermath) led to some firings at the company, but some information retrieval searchers used this log to conduct important experiments. The "60s lady with the dog that kept peeing her sofa" got her hour of fame, and the whole thing became a case study in de-anonymization. A few pointers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233390862_Privacy_Preserving_Web_Query_Log_Publishing_A_Survey_on_AnonymizationTechniques https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233390862_Privacy_P... https://github.com/wasiahmad/aol_query_log_analysis https://github.com/wasiahmad/aol_query_log_analysis https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/08/15/100592/who-benefits-from-aols-released-search-logs/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/08/15/100592/who-benef... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020025509000516 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00200... https://isquared.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/mining-search-logs-for-usage-patterns/ https://isquared.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/mining-search-logs...

Lammy 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20131016001916/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131016001916/http://www.someth... https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124159/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124159/http://www.someth... https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124204/http://www.somethingawful.com/weekend-web/aol-search-log-3 https://web.archive.org/web/20130822124204/http://www.someth... ------------------------------------ https://web.archive.org/web/20131024112051im_/http://i.somethingawful.com//sasbi/2006/08/docevil/8-13-06_27.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20131024112051im_/http://i.somet... https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/23/san-jose-man-convicted-31-years-after-sadistic-rape-murder/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/03/23/san-jose-man-convicte...

karaterobot 3y ago

Re-identification of supposedly anonymous data was a problem twenty years ago, and is a bigger problem today. Soon it may become a crisis, as the tools needed to do it become more and more turnkey, effective, and commodified. Now we dox as in a glass, darkly, etc.

mmvasq 3y ago
This data is already "re-identified" by some somebodies. And complete intent to harm over a course of 5 years proven out. I have evidence, lots of it. The individuals initially affected by the search leak need to be notified by a representative of AOL and probably SOE. Time to stop the dark patterns of attribution games and ready the individuals for what is to come. If I had been caught alone, I probably would have not made it through the harassment that came from the people that have re-identified the data.
- mmvasq 3y ago
  Have three identities confirmed - yet the individuals doing the harassment all know best evidence has to come from law enforcement and the logs - not my screenshots. It's part of the game they play with the data.

neonate 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20170715075814/https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170715075814/https://www.nytim...

zx8080 3y ago

There's one thing could work, but which would be very hard or impossible to implement: management personal responsibility for private data loss/exposure.

mortallywounded 3y ago

Maybe some day we'll have a PIR-based[1] search engine-- but then you couldn't harvest data on your users and sell personalized ads, so maybe not. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval

mmvasq 3y ago

My data is in this list someone used for "research". They evidently correlated with Sony Everquest Chats, LinkedIn, Twitter, AOL, corporate email, Meta, Amazon Purchases, Natural Language Processing Data collections, some DFIR (digital forensics) data collection, HR records and so much more. I would say at the time they collected the info I was planning renaissance fest attire, studying security topics and frantically figuring out identities of some gamers who dogpiled on me as a few made genuine threats towards my life and livelihood. I'd say yes, throw disinformation at at, as once I started noticing someone was really doing that level of tracking I did throw disinfo at it... a lot. The problem was with their interpretations from there of searches intentionally made to mess them up - as I neither had consent yet realized I was being stalked. That went on and on and on - until people died - my father thought I was swatting him (I had a welfare check made - not a swat - as they were disclosing his financial advisor and info - he's white and safe presumably) . Yet yes, people did die. It is evident no one understands it is never just them in research or in a channel for conversations. The result of the whole thing was my childhood best friend also being left homeless and run over (by someone opportunistic in the whole process). My brother de-housed by a gang member a party kept sending about (one actually poisoned my dog). My father alienated. My sister used as a puppet for extortion instead of being rehabbed. It's very very very ugly the string of deaths and alienation that came from what they thought was funny research into AI. This old data needs to be located and disposed of or put into proper custodianship. It's grown teeth that cost lives. Throwing misinfo at it is just crapping up the Internet more to push to web 3.0, where the same problem will thrive. Requires legislation. Not quite relaxed enough to articulate how and what right now due to the extensive harassment that came about from it all. Maybe some day. It's been pretty terrorizing.

neverrroot 3y ago
I'm trying to learn more about what disinformation is, could you please post your thoughts under the following Ask HN post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369