Unfortunately the logs themselves are still very revealing, including people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses; essentially anything that an AOL user could have entered into the search form is in the log.

Think about it: could someone who knows you identify you by looking at your history of searches? Sure. A lot people do searches on their own names just out of curiosity. So then your name would appear in this log along with all other searches done by that searcher. Of course, we couldn’t tell for sure that it was you that searched for that rather embarrassing genre of porn, just that it was someone who knew you by name.

But let’s say that someone also knew that you took a vacation recently in Barbados and refinanced your mortgage this year. Well, what do you know, the public AOL logs show that “anonymized” user name 123456 happened to do a search for your name, that seedy website, “Barbados hotels” and “refinance mortgage”. Hmm.

Actually, this does not even depend on a person having done a search of their own name. I’ve done Google searches on people I’ve known just out of curiosity. If I had done these searches on AOL, then their names would appear in this published data. If one of those people found their name in this log, then they could easily reconstruct my identity based on the same Barbados and refinancing scenarios.

What were those AOL people thinking??? On the page where they released this file (cutely called AOL Research “Alpha”, apparently a little joke about Google’s beta applications), they were very proud of the fact they had obscured the identities of the searchers and shared this valuable data with the world. It seems like these engineers are narrowly focused on their technical achievement but utterly clueless about how their users (and the real people who are named in the published data) might react. Did the above scenario never occur to them or their managers?

I have read that in Google headquarters, they have a giant flatscreen display in the receptionist area showing office visitors real-time searches that are being done. But that isn’t quite the same thing as AOL releasing an entire set of data like this so thoughtlessly.

Update: it appears that the page on the AOL research site that hosted this file has been taken down. Maybe they can ask people to kindly ignore the files that they downloaded while it was available.

Update: CNET.com has examples of some really disturbing searches that hint at people’s identities. I’m sure CNET does not want to expose too much information for fear of getting sued themselves.

Update: TechCrunch.com, one of the sites that first broke this story, posted a link to a NY Times article with the first person positively identified from the data, some poor lady in Georgia. As noted earlier about the CNET report, I’m certain that the only reason more people haven’t been outed in public is because no blogger wants to end up getting sued. The NY Times got this lady’s permission to use her as an example it seems. But no doubt as this data gets around people will be outed among their circle of acquaintances or co-workers. I would not be surprised if eventually someone committed suicide from being mortified with embarrassment.

There is a segment of the technical world that thinks this is not a big deal in proportion to the credit card fraud and identity theft that occurs on a daily basis. But I suspect that, given a choice, these folks would rather have to go through the hassle of closing stolen credit card accounts, compared to having your name and reputation permanently associated with some of the truly demented stuff found in this data.

Dale Carnegie’s book is very interesting, but as I was reading I noticed quite a few spelling errors and words that ran together. I shrugged this off as bad OCR-scanning from the conversion process, it didn’t really bother me. In fact, How to Win Friends and Influence People more than lived up to its reputation for me so I decided to buy the audiobook from Amazon.

As I’m listening to the CD version, I start to realize that there are passages I’ve never heard or read before. It’s clear that the ebook is an abridged version, which is not indicated anywhere on the Mobipocket site. At this point I’m not too upset. I try to get in touch with their customer service. It turns out that their customer service is only available through a bulletin board, that’s kind of unusual. But, keeping in mind the principles of Dale Carnegie, I post a friendly message on the Support forum, asking for a refund since the version they are selling appears to be missing many passages.

A day later the following response is posted from their support team:

I’m sorry but we can not refund you for this reason. You may contact the publisher of this book to give him your point of view about this problem

Best regards,
Aurélien

Er, wut? So I respond, again in what I hope is a Dale Carnegie-esque rational tone:

That doesn’t make sense. You advertise this book on your store. You take payment for it. If it is not the complete book, if entire passages are missing, then you should indicate that on the product page. I should not have to deal with your suppliers directly, that is your responsibility as the seller, don’t you agree?

While I’m waiting for a response I check out some of the other support requests. Some fellow purchased an ebook guide to Paris, but he finds that the maps are unreadable, which makes the guide useless. This guy is very polite in his request for a refund. So what is the response from Mobipocket?

I’m sorry you have bought a book that does not fit with what you’ve expected but we are not responsible of the content of the books and especially their descriptions. You have to contact directly the publisher of the book if yo uhave any remark on the book content.

Beside you should have first download the demo of the book before buying it. It is easy to say that after having bought it.

I just hope you will try to buy other eBooks (maybe from other publishers). You can also post a customer review on the website saying this book is useless.

Sorry for that.
Best regards,
Aurélien

Wow! Is this the Twilight Zone of customer service or what? “It’s your fault, you should have tried the demo first. Go ahead and warn other shoppers if you’d like.”

I don’t know, Mobipocket is a French company so maybe that has something to do with the fact that these people seem to act like they can’t get fired no matter what.