Our Web searches are us

What we type into Web search boxes says a whole lot about us – very personal information most of use wouldn't want to be public. A recent "colossal miscalculation" at AOL, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, highlighted how easily our privacy can be breached. A team of AOL employees "publicly posted the Internet search topics of hundreds of thousands of customers online. The goal was to support academic research about Web traffic, and AOL users' names were replaced by numbers. But that didn't guarantee anonymity," according to the Monitor. The New York Times was able to trace one of those user numbers (4417749) to the woman in Lilburn, Ga., it represented. "AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release," the Times reported, "but the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data." This has bearing in the online-safety field because state attorneys general have recently been calling for age verification in social-networking sites. Verifying children's ages, ID verification experts tell me, would require a national database of children's personal info against which verification technology could check.