AOL Shuts Down AOL Research
Greg Linden reports that AOL has shut down their research department, following the big search privacy scandal that emanated from that department. Now, one commenter says on of the people they fired after the scandal basically was the whole department, but if AOL was serious about trying some research efforts, it is still disheartening to see them give up on it. AOL has so much customer data that could be a wealth of knowledge in the hands of the right researchers. Maybe they could outsource all their customer data to Google, which owns 5% of AOL anyway, as long as Google remains as tight-lipped as we all know them to be.
By the by, if you want to talk about some interesting data, Greg’s been writing about a paper Google released about Bigtable, Google’s massive and robust distributed database system. In his latest post, he notes that the paper cites Google’s web crawl as containing 850 terabytes of data, while Google Analytics has 250 terabytes. Is it just me, or does that seem like a big waste given that (a) Google search earns billions of dollars and (b) Google Analytics loses money. Hmm…
The article wrote: ‘Maybe they could outsource all their customer data to Google, which owns 5% of AOL anyway, as long as Google remains as tight-lipped as we all know them to be.‘
I would hope not!!!!! That is exactly who I would most NOT want to have access to my AOL searches. The whole point of privacy rights it to keep the data away from organization like Google who would mine it. I don’t care at all if AOL posts a subset of my results for the world to see like they did with the previous leak — I have nothnig that interesting there that’s that interesting. But I do NOT want some computers doing some sneaky algorithm to profile me in the ways that Google’s capable of; because God knows what effect that’ll have on my credit rating or health insurance in the future.
It’s not too far-fetched to believe that Google will someday find patterns like “he searched for junk food at walmart too late in the evening; so he must be a credit risk and a health risk”. That’s waht I whould hope privacy laws would stop.
Comment by RMX | September 4, 2006
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Pretexting and the HP Corporate Board Room
This week an HP board of director quit his job because of what he thought was an unethical investigation into leaks from the board room to the press. Just when we thought some behaviors were over with in the board room, we run smack into the HP problem…
Trackback by Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security | September 9, 2006
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