p2pnet.net News:- AOL and Sony BMG have something common: they’re both enmeshed in major debacles which aren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

Sony’s was the appalling rootkit DRM farce and AOL’s was the disastrous leakage of search material.

Ed Felten has an interesting take on the latter situation. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Great, Now They’ll Never Give Us Data
By Ed Felten – Freedom to Tinker

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article by Katie Hafner on AOL’s now-infamous release of customers’ search data.

AOL’s goal in releasing the data was to help researchers by giving them realistic data to study. Today’s technologies, such as search engines, have generated huge volumes of information about what people want online and why. But most of this data is locked up in the data centers of companies like AOL, Google, and eBay, where researchers can’t use it. So researchers have been making do with a few old datasets. The lack of good data is certainly holding back progress in this important area. AOL wanted to help out by giving researchers a better dataset to work with.

Somebody at AOL apparently thought they had “anonymized” the data by replacing the usernames with meaningless numbers. That was a terrible misjudgement – if there is one thing we have learned from the AOL data, it is that people reveal a lot about themselves in their search queries. Reporters have identified at least two of the affected AOL users by name, and finding and publishing embarrassing search sequences has become a popular sport.

The article quotes some prominent researchers, including Jon Kleinberg, saying they’ll refuse to work with this data on ethical grounds. I don’t quite buy that there is an ethical duty to avoid research uses of the data. If I had a valid research use for it, I’m pretty sure I could develop my own guidelines for using it without exacerbating the privacy problem. If I had had something to do with inducing the ill-fated release of the data, I might have an obligation to avoid profiting from my participation in the release. But if the data is out there due to no fault of mine, and the abuses that occur are no fault of mine, why shouldn’t I be able to use the data responsibly, for the public good?

Researchers know that this incident will make companies even more reluctant to release data, even after anonymizing it. If you’re a search-behavior expert, this AOL data may be the last useful data you see for a long time – which is all the more reason to use it.

Most of all, the AOL search data incident reminds us of the complexity of identity and anonymity online. It should have been obvious that removing usernames wasn’t enough to anonymize the data. But this is actually a common kind of mistake – simplistic distinctions between “personally identifiable information” and other information pervade the policy discussion about privacy. The same error is common in debates about big government data mining programs – it’s not as easy as you might think to enable data analysis without also compromising privacy.

In principle, it might have been possible to transform the search data further to make it safe for release. In practice we’re nowhere near understanding how to usefully depersonalize this kind of data. That’s an important research problem in itself, which needs its own datasets to work on. If only somebody had released a huge mass of poorly depersonalized data …

---

Please help p2pnet to overcome the Kazaa / Hemming libel lawsuit. Every penny counts. Canada’s antiquated defamation law chills online freedom of speech .

---