machine-envy

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on AOL’s search data blunder of a fortnight ago.

Since filing, there’s been some interesting developnments worth linking to, such as this story from the NYT of one searcher who identified herself from the data and this piece in the WSJ on what the search trends say about us. If you want to do your own research, try this little search tool. And if you’re worried your search data might be intercepted and published in a national newspaper one day, follow this advice from the EFF.

“Everyone has a billboard ad they hate. For me, it’s “AOL/discuss”. Perhaps it’s because I spend a good part of my working life pondering the eight-foot-high questions plastered across them (”Is technology killing the art of conversation? AOL/discuss”) that whenever the bus is driving past one, I strain my neck to see it just so that I can hate it more.

AOL will have been asking itself some tough questions lately. This month, to the horror of the blogosphere, it released 658,000 personal, three-month-long search histories for US users. So, AOL, is the internet the ultimate invasion of privacy? Let’s/discuss…”

Read the rest here.