"Reaction [beta]"
Thelma Arnold 9 Aug 2006
On Sunday night, AOL purposefully released a 2Gb file containing 20 million partially-anonymised search queries from it's users. On Monday, AOL Spokesman Andrew Weinstein apologised on behalf of the company in an open letter that he released to the press and personally posted on a number of popular blogs.
Unfortunately, it seems that the damage has already been done...
Later that day, the first web interface to the data went online (providing an easy means for people to analyse it) and today the New York Times has positively identified a user based on this information.
Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Georgia was pinpointed based upon searches ranging from "numb fingers" to "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything". Ms. Arnold is AOL user no. 4417749.
Upon learning of her identification, Ms. Arnold said "My goodness, it's my whole personal life...I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder."
[Source: Techcrunch]
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