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They know all about you
Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co
Monday August 28, 2006
The Guardian
In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. "My wife doesnt love animore," he told the machine. He searched for "Stop your divorce" and "I want revenge to my wife" before turning to self-examination with "alchool withdrawl", "alchool withdrawl sintoms" (at 10 in the morning) and "disfunctional erection". On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could "predict my futur". But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google - from which AOL buys in its search functions.
The gigantic database detailing these customers' search inquiries was available on an AOL research site for just a few hours before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names did not really protect their identities enough. The company apologised for its mistake - and removed the database from the internet. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and last week AOL's chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, resigned. But those few hours online were enough for the raw data files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now four or five sites where anyone can search through them using specialised software.
What was published by AOL represents only a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge warehoused within Google's records - but it has given all of us, as users, a dramatic and unsettling glimpse of how much, and in what intimate detail, the big search engines know about us.
The number of searches Google carries out is a secret, but comScore, an independent firm, reckons that the search engine performed 2.7bn searches by American users alone in July this year. Yahoo, its main rival, conducted around 1.8bn American searches in the same month; Microsoft's MSN around 800m and AOL 366m.
All of this information is stored. Google identifies every computer that connects to it with an implant (known as a cookie) which will not expire until 2038. If you also use Gmail, Google knows your email address - and, of course, keeps all your email searchable. If you sign up to have Google ads on a website, then the company knows your bank account details and home address, as well as all your searches. If you have a blog on the free blogger service, Google owns that. The company also knows, of course, the routes you have looked up on Google maps. Yahoo operates a similar range of services.
All this knowledge has been handed over quite freely by us as users. It is the foundation of Google's fortune because it allows the company to target very precisely the advertising it sends in our direction. Other companies have equally ambitious plans: an application lodged on August 10 with the US Patent & Trademark Office showed that Amazon is hoping to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live.
Even though the search logs that AOL released were made anonymous, by assigning a number to each user, it is not difficult in many cases to discover somebody's name from their search queries. And it is easy to follow exactly what users were thinking as they sat at their computers, in the apparent privacy of their own homes, since the time and date of every search is given.
On April 4, for instance, user 14162375, the melancholy Portuguese-American in Florida, seems to have passed out on the keyboard at 6.20pm, when he asked, suddenly, "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb" then "vvvvbmkmjk" and "vvglhkitopppfoppr". An hour later he had recovered enough to search for variations on his wife's name - he thought she might have moved to New England. On the evening of April 16, matters came to a head. "My cheating wife," he typed; and then, five times, "I want to kill myself," and then "I want to make my wife suffer," followed quickly by "Kill my wifes mistress," "My wifes ass," "A cheating wife". Two days after that he was back looking for audio surveillance and bugging equipment and four weeks later he seemed to have cheered up and was looking for motorcycle insurance.
The story stops abruptly there, at the end of May, because that is when the three months' worth of released AOL search records came to an end.
One of the first researchers to demonstrate that we will tell anything, however intimate, to a computer, was Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT, who in 1966 wrote a programme called "Eliza" that parodied non-directional psychotherapy. If the user typed anything in, Eliza would appear to ask a question based on that cue. In no time at all, unhappy students were telling the computer all their troubles as if there were a real and sympathetic person behind the screen. Stories and jokes about this circulated for decades, but the men most successful at turning this concept into a fortune were the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. As users, we think that the Google search engine is a way of supplying us with information about what's on the web. But the flow of information is two way. We ask Google things that we would hesitate to ask anyone living. The price for the answers is that Google remembers it all.
READ MORE HERE
Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co
Monday August 28, 2006
The Guardian
In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. "My wife doesnt love animore," he told the machine. He searched for "Stop your divorce" and "I want revenge to my wife" before turning to self-examination with "alchool withdrawl", "alchool withdrawl sintoms" (at 10 in the morning) and "disfunctional erection". On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could "predict my futur". But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google - from which AOL buys in its search functions.
The gigantic database detailing these customers' search inquiries was available on an AOL research site for just a few hours before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names did not really protect their identities enough. The company apologised for its mistake - and removed the database from the internet. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and last week AOL's chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, resigned. But those few hours online were enough for the raw data files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now four or five sites where anyone can search through them using specialised software.
What was published by AOL represents only a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge warehoused within Google's records - but it has given all of us, as users, a dramatic and unsettling glimpse of how much, and in what intimate detail, the big search engines know about us.
The number of searches Google carries out is a secret, but comScore, an independent firm, reckons that the search engine performed 2.7bn searches by American users alone in July this year. Yahoo, its main rival, conducted around 1.8bn American searches in the same month; Microsoft's MSN around 800m and AOL 366m.
All of this information is stored. Google identifies every computer that connects to it with an implant (known as a cookie) which will not expire until 2038. If you also use Gmail, Google knows your email address - and, of course, keeps all your email searchable. If you sign up to have Google ads on a website, then the company knows your bank account details and home address, as well as all your searches. If you have a blog on the free blogger service, Google owns that. The company also knows, of course, the routes you have looked up on Google maps. Yahoo operates a similar range of services.
All this knowledge has been handed over quite freely by us as users. It is the foundation of Google's fortune because it allows the company to target very precisely the advertising it sends in our direction. Other companies have equally ambitious plans: an application lodged on August 10 with the US Patent & Trademark Office showed that Amazon is hoping to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live.
Even though the search logs that AOL released were made anonymous, by assigning a number to each user, it is not difficult in many cases to discover somebody's name from their search queries. And it is easy to follow exactly what users were thinking as they sat at their computers, in the apparent privacy of their own homes, since the time and date of every search is given.
On April 4, for instance, user 14162375, the melancholy Portuguese-American in Florida, seems to have passed out on the keyboard at 6.20pm, when he asked, suddenly, "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb" then "vvvvbmkmjk" and "vvglhkitopppfoppr". An hour later he had recovered enough to search for variations on his wife's name - he thought she might have moved to New England. On the evening of April 16, matters came to a head. "My cheating wife," he typed; and then, five times, "I want to kill myself," and then "I want to make my wife suffer," followed quickly by "Kill my wifes mistress," "My wifes ass," "A cheating wife". Two days after that he was back looking for audio surveillance and bugging equipment and four weeks later he seemed to have cheered up and was looking for motorcycle insurance.
The story stops abruptly there, at the end of May, because that is when the three months' worth of released AOL search records came to an end.
One of the first researchers to demonstrate that we will tell anything, however intimate, to a computer, was Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT, who in 1966 wrote a programme called "Eliza" that parodied non-directional psychotherapy. If the user typed anything in, Eliza would appear to ask a question based on that cue. In no time at all, unhappy students were telling the computer all their troubles as if there were a real and sympathetic person behind the screen. Stories and jokes about this circulated for decades, but the men most successful at turning this concept into a fortune were the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. As users, we think that the Google search engine is a way of supplying us with information about what's on the web. But the flow of information is two way. We ask Google things that we would hesitate to ask anyone living. The price for the answers is that Google remembers it all.
READ MORE HERE
