In response to the recent AOL privacy blunder Unspam Technologies, Inc., a Utah based anti-spam firm, launched a new service to keep search engines guessing as to the real preferences of their users.

The traditional advice given to maintain your privacy online is to regularly delete the “cookies” from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach. The free service works with AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo and lets users register the tracking cookies from their favorite search engines. Lost in the Crowd then runs random searches at random times from its servers. Because the service has the users’ tracking cookies, the searches appear to come from the users using the actual search engine themselves.

I wonder how long it will take the search engines to filter out queries from UnSpam’s servers?

That search log data that AOL released is simply not going to go away. It’s out there, people have it, and they’re having way too much fun with it. AOL Search Logs is sort of a community site where users sift through the released logs and create profiles of the User IDs connected to the data. I won’t link to any in particular, but they have found stuff that ranges from highly embarrassing to utterly criminal.

I admit I did a vanity search to see if any of the searches had anything to do with me or my friends. Luckily, I didn’t find anything “bad”, but one of my friends claims she did find her own searches, which she refuses to link me to. Wonder what kind of freaky stuff she was searching for.

I recommend to everyone to at least do a quick search for any info that you might not be aware is now public knowledge.

AOL Search Logs isn’t the only site out there indexing this data, and there are bound to be many others. The data has also become the source for much entertainment elsewhere.

With good reason, people are complaining.

For those who think that the recent AOL privacy slip-up is not an issue since the data was masked by User IDs, here is a perfect example of just how easy it is to connect a people to their data.

Let’s just hope, as the article says, that there is a silver lining behind this type of situation and people begin to pay attention to these types of privacy issues.

Unfortunately, people are far too lazy and tend to quickly forget that most things they do online should be thought of as a matter of public record. Who among us doesn’t have an embarrassing forum post or some other form of online shenanigans databased and indexed “forever” via Google or the Wayback Machine?

Proof of this lies in the alarming amount of people that still use the name of their cat or significant other as their main password.

Do you assume that the details about you search for are just between you and your search engine? If you use AOL, you might be sorely mistaken.

Of course, other search engines have shown us glimpses of what people search for in the past, but it’s usually not connected to users in any way, as was the case with AOL’s release.

I’d almost say that they get what they deserve for using AOL, but bad things can happen when information like that is released inadvertently.