Just Another Number

Here's the ''Quotation of the Day'' from yesterday's NY Times, yeah I know the NY Times, but it kind of ties back to web surveillance & identity metioned in the lec and tute:
"My goodness, it’s my whole personal life. I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder." - Thelma Arnold, an AOL user who was identified through her Web searches."
Here's an excerpt from the article "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749" by Michael Barbaro & Tom Zeller Jr. (Being the NY Times, they wouldn't let me link)
"Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher’s anonymity, but it was not much of a shield...And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern... It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her. AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release, saying it was an unauthorized move by a team that had hoped it would benefit academic researchers. But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data... 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...”
There's also an interesting pic from a NY Times Store ad for a photo print of an early MIT computer. Stella