AOL’s Data Leak Campaign

EFF.org, or the Electonic Frontier Foundation, has released a campaign on AOL's massive data leak. For those who are not familiar with the EFF, they are a firm primarily composed of lawyers who defend freedom in the digital world. They take cases concerning everything from illegal downloads to copyright infringements, but really focus their attention on the trials which affect the digital landscape as we know it. Check out the EFF website or click on the above icon to access phone numbers concerning the AOL blunder, etc.

I also wrote an article on my innovation site which outlines anonymizing software and why this data leak will happen again. The high points of the article are featured below, or you can view the whole post at innovators.jdsblog .com.

I am going to explain some implications though, and suggest a remedy. Every search engine, or at least the major ones, save all of the data that is searched by you on your computer. This can be done through cookies, logins, etc. Even if you delete your cookies and history and employ on of those privacy plugins, your browser will still be associated with you. This is because after you go back to google and perform another search, the new cookie that is assigned knows you already, and hooks up with the cookie you just deleted from its own database. That is really the most simple way for me to explain it.

How you ask? The answer is your IP address. And if your IP address changes, which if you are on broadband it hardly ever does, it will be recorded in a database with the internet service provider. And if that is not enough, every NIC (network interface card - your ethernet card) in the known world has a seperate and individual MAC address that it is assigned. Your surfing is not so private after all, huh?

Enter AOL. They release data relating to search results. Why? What benefit does that have? On some blogs and articles, people were commenting on how they were going to build a mySQL database on top of the data and make it searchable for research purposes. That is idiocy. There is more than enough data about search techniques and keywords and everything else known to man that is comprised of good data, why do you need the rubbish supplied from AOL.

Finally, to the remedy. At eff.org, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you will find a lot of data on the AOL release, court cases, anonynimity information, etc. You will also see a link and write-up about a utility called Tor. Tor is privacy software that allows you to surf the web anonymously. You in effect bounce off servers to scramble your signal.