Who Should be Having Important Conversations?

AOL recently released the search histories of more than 650,000 of its users. There were no identities revealed, but it was possible to track what an individual person (many individual people) was searching for on AOL Search.

The company has apologized for a researcher’s disclosure of the massive database, and has removed it from their web site. However, the database had already been mirrored and is available for continued examination.

The profiles range ” from the mundane to the illicit and bizarre.” You can read about some of the search profiles in an article at cnet News.com, AOL offers glimpse into users’ lives. Bazaar & scary!

Aside from the titillating glimpses, what does this mean? It’s going to happen again. What is privacy? What are our privacy rights? What is the difference between privacy in the U.S., The Netherlands, an aboriginal village in Southeast Asia, or most typical business endeavors?

There are some pretty important conversations going on, and teachers, as much as (if not more than) anyone else, should be engaged in these conversations. Blogging, wikis, and other new web applications seem ready-made for these conversations — but what do teachers talk about in your teacher’s lounge?

I know that a lot of teachers are engaged in book-reading clubs. Is there some way that we might expand this?

What do you think?

2¢ Worth!

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9 thoughts on “Who Should be Having Important Conversations?”

  1. What do you think is going to happen to AOL? Is it illegal what they have done? I mean, surely something has to be done to show people (and companies, organisations, etc) that this is not acceptable and a total breach of people’s trust and privacy rights… but with so many people affected, how will AOL ever make it right?

    Do you know if people are already analysing the data and if they are going to make them available (either publicly or for some ludicrous sum of money)?

    =S

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  2. That’s a good question, Cherrie. Perhaps nothing, since privacy was not really violated. There is no way to know who is associated with specific sets of searches. What do you think should happen?

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  3. David, I think you are asking a great question and in my experience great conversations stem from great questions. During the summer of 1999 I taught a social studies methods course at Michigan State University. One of the requirements for the class was that all students had to post an email message about a substantive issue to a class list-serv every week. We had unbelieveable conversations about all kinds of topics. Since that summer I’ve believe that all that has to happen for a substantive conversation to take place is somebody has to start it and there has to be a neutral site on which everybody can post. One of the problems with blogs is that some extent everybody has a self interest in promoting their own blogs. For example, so far I’m pleased with the comment that I am writing here and somebody advised me today to link to another blogger every day, in an effort to promote traffic on my own blog. Therefore, I’m going to copy this message and post it on my own blog. Ultimately if everybody did that the conversation would exist on many blogs but it would be incoherent since it would be in so many different places. Perhaps wikis would be great places to hold such conversations. But unfortunately, while I’ve learned how to use blogs this summer, I still don’t know how to use wikis very well. David, you’re definitely a leader in the educational blogosphere, maybe it’s up to you to select a neutral site and begin a conversation.

    What do other people think?

    Andrew Pass
    http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html

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  5. “There is no way to know who is associated with specific sets of searches.”

    Really? What if someone was browsing through the searches and found a ‘user’ with trends that pointed towards criminal activity? Would the police have authority to get AOL to give them more information to identify the person for further investigation? Who knows what criteria are used to judge for ‘crime’ or ‘terrorism’ or…

    I haven’t looked at the data (it’s a really big download!), but can you sort by region? That could have some really weird applications and possibly some weird stereotyping.

    …mmm would there be any possibility that someone would want to claim an id? What I mean is, an id’s searching habits are so unique and interesting that people are willing to pay for their opinion… or perhaps searching habits can be categorised into certain categories… then people who fit into each category can be paid or wanted by I-don’t-know-who-but-people-or-companies-who-want-that-info… then those identities could be ‘sold’ in a sense?

    What should happen? I guess it depends on AOL users – if they feel that their rights have been violated. I guess it also depends on other people who have their profiles and habits tracked by certain companies on the net – would they want their histories displayed (although Diigo does this, doesn’t it…) without their consent? I guess what I’m saying is, whatever happens here will be a sort of benchmark for the future…

    It’ll be cool to see if professional profilers (particularly those specialised for the internet) can use this data as an exercise to see how good they really are!!! =P (or rather, the consensus among the profession…?)

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