The first person to be positively identified due to the AOL search query release

The first person to be positively identified due to the AOL search query release this weekend is the lucky Ms. Thelma Arnold. Or at least the first person to allow her name to be put in print, that is. I'm willing to bet the authors of the article identified at least one or two other candidates, and Ms. Arnold was just the first they could contact. Give it another day or two and I'm sure more people will be positively identified. There's just too much data, too easily searched, for more people to not show up.

AOL has already admitted what they did was wrong. They've apologized in general, and apparently to Ms. Arnold in particular. But I still see lawsuits in the near future as more people are found due to their search queries. And some people won't have innocent explanations for the nature of their searches like Ms. Arnold did.

I have a friend who watched an episode of CSI a couple of years ago and saw something he'd never seen before, furries. He was fascinated by the fact that there are people out there who like dressing up in animal costumes to indulge in their fantasies. He spent a couple weeks doing searches and laughing whenever he found some strange new twist to this fetish. Then one day he satisfied his curiosity and moved on. Imagine if his search queries had been part of the data AOL exposed to the Internet. If you were researching some of the account information in the database, what would you think of someone who's been spending a lot of their time searching for 'furries dalmatian Virginia'?