Privacy: the big flaw in Web 2.0
While I understand many of the benefits of Web 2.0, the downsides have always bothered me. Few people realize that everything they do online is public knowledge. Techcrunch is up in arms about AOL’s recent release of data (Google cache). User 17556639 may well find himself in trouble pretty soon.
The data release may be a good thing. It gives us a clearer picture of what a government can get if it subpoenas a search engine. This may either help change the law, or the data-retention practices of Web 2.0 companies. Ultimately we may see a Web 3.0 emerge: where data leakage to the web-application is minimized and monitored by your web-browser. For instance the browser could encrypt the data, and while the web application could ask questions about the data, their number would be strictly controlled.
August 8th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
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August 22nd, 2006 at 9:47 am
Here’s a *quick* site where you can search the AOL data for yourself:
http://www.frogspy.com
August 22nd, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Thanks. It’s interesting to see what people searched for. It’s a little like google trends, but shows you the whole context of the term.
September 2nd, 2006 at 6:54 pm
[…] When you request a page from a website, the website needs to know where your computer is so that it can send the information back to you. This is one way that search engines such as AOL identify all a users’ searches. Anonymous proxies, such as those provided by Tor, can hide your computer behind an effective smokescreen of other computers. […]