AOL users by the ####'s: two cases

Posted Aug 9th 2006 4:23PM by Michael Canfield
Filed under: Bad News, Consumer Experience, Rants and Raves, Time Warner (TWX)

User 4417749, and User 927 they are called. User 4417749 is interested in landscaping providers in a Georgia town, men in their 60's, and cleaning dog pee off the carpets. Is a picture already forming in your mind? User 927 has sought information on skin mold, Yoko Ono, dog sex and mange. That's just off the top of the report: consumerist has the link to 927's entire history. The info on 4417749 comes from a New York Times article.

Despite my previous "what's the bid deal" rap, it's daunting stuff, and I wonder what picture my own quirks and preoccupations would be formed from a report of my own searches. The story, despite AOL's quick admission of a "screw up" and its apology, has continued to grow throughout the week.

We know that lessons on keeping stewardship of privacy are hard to learn. Two kids were arrested just the other day for the theft of a laptop containing data on over 25 million active and former U.S. military personnel. How else could a second laptop scandal involving U.S. military veterans personal information occur within months of the first? Because everyone's data is everywhere, maybe the real surprise is new stories like this don't break hourly.

"Information wants to be free," hacker Steward Brand famously said, but it is as true to say, "information wants to escape." Maybe it's only the sheer weight, the staggering amounts of all this information compiled "anonymously" on servers across the globe, that is really providing any modicum of privacy protection at all.

Michael Canfield is a private investor and writer, in Seattle. He doesn't own stock in Time Warner, and is a freelancer, not an employee of AOL or Time Warner.

Tags: aol, consumer protection, ConsumerProtection, identity theft, IdentityTheft, net privacy, NetPrivacy, time warner, TimeWarner, twx