[IP] more on AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users
Begin forwarded message:
From: steven cherry <steven@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 8, 2006 9:31:34 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users
A search for an SSN shaped regex on the full AOL search data
returns a 191 results including repeat searches. Many of these
have full names, and at least a dozen include either an addresses,
drivers license number, date of birth or some combination of the
three in the same query. There's no telling how much more
information an aggregation of other queries by those same user ID
would yield.
Dave,
Latanya Sweeney, a computer privacy researcher at CMU, has been
looking at this sort of thing for several years now. For example,
many resumes posted to Monster and other job boards have SSNs in a
standard format, along with dates of birth and other revealing
information. They can be found in PDFs as well as HTML pages quite
easily. The problem is even worse - at least those resumes are self-
posted. There are government databases and court records on line with
some of the same information as well. See
<http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar05/2947>
Why Pay to be an Identity Thief? Experimental
Software Makes It Free
Thieves purchased sensitive personal data from
ChoicePoint, but a Carnegie Mellon University
researcher can get the same information free
on the Web
--
Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566
Senior Associate Editor
IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave, New York, NY 10016
<s.cherry@xxxxxxxx> <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org>
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