A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749
From The New York Times: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749
Read this if you ever used a search engine, or ever connected to the Internet. Seriously…read it. This is one of the most important articles you’ll read this year - it details how easy it was for a reporter to personally identify someone simply from their search queries.
From the article: “But the unintended consequences of all that data being compiled, stored and cross-linked are what Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington, called ‘a ticking privacy time bomb.’” Really. Said Ms. Arnold: “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life. I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.” The sad part is, most people don’t. In response, she plans to drop her AOL subscription. “We all have a right to privacy,” she said. “Nobody should have found this all out.”
It’s time for us to start fighting back. And there are ways of surfing anonymously…check out Torpark, an optimized secure tunnel/browser combination that will allow you to surf in peace, or the Scroogle Scraper, which searches Google yet deletes its logs every 48 hours (this will not protect your searches from being logged by your ISP the way Torpark does)…just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean you want the entire world to know your business…