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

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.