Thelma Arnold of Lilburn, Georgia — Come On Down!
You’re the first person positively identified thanks to AOL‘s completely asinine decision to release 20 million partially anonymized search queries into the wild on Sunday!!!
Using search queries such as “numb fingers” and “60 single men” as well as other data, the NY Times was able to identify the 62-year-old Arnold (here’s a link to the NY Times’ article).
Scary, huh?
Reports that AOL offered Ms. Arnold 1500 free hours as retribution have not yet been confirmed.
well, it doesn’t exactly take sherlock holmes, does it and i suppose that is the times’s point. this was idiotic on aol’s part.
that being said, i do give google express authorization to compile my search results and in return they deliver more relevant searches to me.
if i want to search for really shady stuff, i just make sure i am doing it anonymously ;-)
Hey Atlanta, let’s play Full Disclosure! Mine comes with tunes:
http://spaceygreview.blogspot.com/2006/08/its-my-life.html
John Battelle’s Searchblog has a little more.
Techcrunch has a number of articles related to this linked in this one article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/09/first-person-identified-from-aol-data-thelma-arnold/