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pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly *stupid*: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine - there used to be *lots* of search engines!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL%5Fsearch%5Flog%5Frelease

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design#bringing-home-the-beacon

1/

A moody room with Shining-esque broadloom. In fhe foreground stands a giant figure the with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; its eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and has the logo for Meta AI on its lapel; it peers though a magnifying glass at a tiny figure standing on its vast palm. The tiny figure has a leg caught in a leg-hold trap and wears an expression of eye-rolling horror. In the background, gathered around a sofa and an armchair, is a ranked line of grinning businessmen, who are blue and flickering in the manner of a hologram display in Star Wars. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en