If the Kiddieporn Police were stupid enough to raid you based on your search, you can be sure they wouldn't find "nothing." An "unproductive" raid is very embarrassing to those crusading officers and their politician-prosecutor bosses, so they'd do whatever it takes to avoid coming up empty handed. If they scoured your hard disk and found no child pornography, they'd probably just plant some of what they had lying around the lab and commit serial perjury (they'd get away with that because it's your word against theirs-- a statement by an esteemed vice officer is always believable while that of a presumed pedophile never is). Failing that, they can easily trump up some other "genuine" violations sufficient to justify the raid and persuade you to accept their plea bargain so they can get credit for both the raid and the conviction on this month's status report. With the proliferation of laws, a prosecutor who wants to get you can always find some convincing evidence of a violation, even if it's a law you never knew existed (or something Alberto Gonzales dreamed up at Dick Cheney's request). That's how Justice works in Bushi Amerika.

In all the protests against AOL's sharing of the query-log data, there
has been little discussion of the importance of such data to research
on information retrieval. In addition to the real privacy concerns, a
key point that must be considered is the fact that if useable data is
not made available to the wider research community, only the big
search companies will be able to analyze that data. We academic
researchers are increasingly dependent upon industry for this sort of
data to do research; the sort of small-scale data that can be gathered
in a university-based setting is simply insufficient for obtaining
reliable experimental results.

Should companies be prevented from sharing data with the research
community (either by law or public outcry), research progress will be
greatly reduced, as it will be impossible to compare different studies
with one another, since each study's data will be proprietary, and
thus no one will be able to trust any research result from another
lab. All non-industrial research in this area will more-or-less dry
up, and search technology will tend more and more to be developed in
"closed-shop" efforts within the large firms; innovative startups and
open-source hacking will not exist, since the research projects that
serve as launching pads for such technological innovation will not
exist. This prospect should disturb us all, as search technology
(broadly construed) is more and more the vehicle that people use to
gain information about their society and the world.

All of this is not meant to ignore the real privacy issues that can be
involved in the preparation and release of such data. It appears to
me that there was little real privacy risk in the data released by
AOL, but it is clear that policies and practices need to be debated
and developed that accomplish two essential goals: (a) to protect the
privacy of individuals in any sharing of research data, and (b) to
ensure that as much useful data can be shared by companies with the
greater research community.

Shlomo Argamon, Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL 60616

Perhaps one of the early research projects can be towards better anonymisation tools, which preserve privacy but don't destroy the information content. Clearly, what was used here didn't get the job done.

Shlomo Argamon:
"It appears to me that there was little real privacy risk
in the data released by AOL"

Are you outta freakin' gourd?

Take a look at:

news.com.com/AOL+offers+glimpse+into+users+lives/2100-1030_3-6103098.html

No real privacy risk??? The New York Times has already located
and interviewed one 62y.o. woman who verified her search data. And
no doubt they picked her because she was less self-incriminating
than others.