AOL's data gush: Help, they're reading my postcards!

Posted by: Stephen Baker on August 08, 2006

The fuss about AOL’s data gusher reminds me of a story I heard a week ago about the advent of penny postcards in the 19th century. They provided a handy communications tool, and cost half as much to send as a letter. This fueled fear: What if the mailman reads my mail?! Eventually (most) people figured out that for personnel stuff they should spend the extra penny and put it in an envelope.

The same will happen with electronic communication. At some point it will sink in that none of this stuff is private. Not our clicks, not our searches, not our e-mail. More premium secure services will emerge, and we’ll figure out how to carve out our little (and I do mean little) spheres of privacy in the networked world.

Greg Yardley writes: “You should assume that someday your entire search history (and/or your full browser history) will someday be made available to everybody, complete with easy-to-search interface. I’m not entirely certain that’ll happen - but you shouldn’t be shocked if it does.” (ex B2B)

For corporations, this brings risks. Search-engine dataminers will be able to see what sorts of patents companies are following, which takeover targets they’re tracking. One answer, I’m hearing from Yahoo, is to rent secure, dedicated servers to corporate customers. These will handle no one’s search queries but the company’s own. This means that if your company has a search deal with Yahoo, you could get in big trouble for inadvertent Googling.