Jimmy Daniels on AOL User No. 4417749
Posted in Jimmy took notice of my recent foray into Rosenbaum’s Dilemma but explored things in a different light- the plague of UA Pron and AOL’s releasing user’s search data- whoops!
Jimmy notes:
Remember the big hubbub of the Government trying to get search data from Google and Microsoft last year? Well, apparently no one at AOL does, they just released search data from 650,000 users, they removed the AOL username, but just changed it to a random id number, so all the data is still collected by user, and apparently, it includes lots of stuff that lots of people would be embarrassed by, or jailed over.
Another interesting possibility, and another reason no one should have access to this data, user 17556639 could already be marked by police as a potential wrong doer, and it could be for the wrong reasons. My friend Wayne Porter is a security researcher for Facetime Communications, and in a recent post talked about how he had researched a case of UA pornography, if he was one AOL at the time, he could already be marked by someone as a pedophile.
It reminds me of my reaction to some of the chat transcripts from Perverted-Justice.com. After investigating a case of UA pornography during my job as a security researcher I realized how little I knew about the subject. I went to the site and began reading one of the transcripts and became physically ill. I simply stopped and cried and could not even finish the first transcript. Was it ugly? Yes. Was it terrible? Yes. Did I need to read it? Yes. I am a security researcher- it is my job to understand the criminal and how they operate and not assume I know what is really going on. I didn’t know as much as I thought- I was naive.
Wayne is most definitely not a pedophile, he is a scholar and a gentleman,
Thanks Jimmy. Good to know I am a scholar and a gentlemen! This does makes me feel sorry for poor Fima and his case.
Thankfully AOL “apologized”
Don’t say I didn’t warn anyone about Google’s use of a GUID. A globally unique identifier (GUID) is used for unique IDs. No two GUIDs are the same no matter what computer they were generated on. One day the police might start playing match the “GUID”.
Government & Politics Personal PrivacyPopularity: 4% [?]
[...] Let’s hope so, I use Google as much as the next guy, I KNOW anyone who gets hold of that data could find out lots of stuff about me. The thing is, as Wayne Porter reminded me recently, Google uses a unique id for each user as well, even on separate computers, no two id’s are the same. This data ends up in the wrong hands and it’s hard to tell what could be figured out with it. Don’t say I didn’t warn anyone about Google’s use of a GUID. A globally unique identifier (GUID) is used for unique IDs. No two GUIDs are the same no matter what computer they were generated on. One day the police might start playing match the “GUID”. [...]