'Cannot Sleep with Snoring Husband' invites new questions about internet privacy, intimacy
By Joe Palandrani | April 23Just under seven years before Edward Snowden made internet privacy a topic of national conversation, AOL found itself embroiled in its own alarming — if less massive — personal data scandal. As part of a research initiative, the company collected search information from over 650,000 of its users for three months, yielding roughly 20 million queries. Each of these searches included information about who conducted them, when they did so and which websites they visited immediately afterward. While the text files that contained all this data were never supposed to leave AOL's systems, one researcher — out of negligence or insubordination — made them available to the general public. AOL deleted the files quickly, but not quickly enough — they were downloaded and copied by a number of internet users almost immediately, and all of the information remains easily accessible today.
