AOL data leaks on a plane
I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between fandom and high tech communities (in fact, that’s the topic of my talk at Foo Camp today, which I hope at least a modest number of people will attend — I’m up against some sessions that I wish I could visit).
I just wrote a column about why I’d rather check out the free fan culture that’s grown up around Snakes on a Plane than actually see the movie — though generally I love bad monster movie. There’s been a lot of “what went wrong” articles about why the online buzz around Snakes didn’t translate into ticket sales. Nobody seems to have hit upon the obvious answer: some kinds of culture cannot be sold. What was popular about Snakes online was the way it inspired all kinds of free culture — joke posters, video parodies, cartoons, etc. These creations are satire, which means they’re funny because they aren’t really about Snakes per se — they make fun of other things (think about the “liquids on a plane” poster). That’s why they don’t necessarily kindle interest in the movie that inspired them. Think of the Snakes fan culture as a fork in a software project. People who enjoy and create Snakes satires aren’t necessarily the same ones who will go to see Snakes the movie.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about another tech community — this time, one that was created coercively. I refer to the people whose privacy was violated by the AOL data leak — the company deliberately released three months worth of search query data that wasn’t adequately anonymized. Although AOL has taken the data down, sites like Don’tDelete are still hosting it, in searchable form. Now I’m hearing reports that searching this data has become so popular that the top hits on some people’s names in Google are from their AOL search queries. Nobody is thrilled to discover this. You can learn an awful lot about someone’s private life by looking at their searches for, say, medical and personal information.
To square the circle, I’d say the people victimized by the AOL leak remind me of all the music fans sued by the RIAA. These are people who innocently used a corporate product in a way they thought was lawful and safe, and were punished by the corporation that built it.
August 27th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
A – Better check your column links in this post. (1st one says Snakes, Is AOL.)
August 28th, 2006 at 9:00 am
Fixed! Thanks.
August 29th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Annalee, that’s a great parallel between the RIAA and AOL. People who stuck with AOL after the Time/Warner merger probably clung to the innovation and brand trust they built in the 1990s. They may have still felt good about AOL Search & AIM and continued to use the products believing paying for a service gave them a bit more anonymity.
They’re not the first to have a giant “OOPS” and probably hot the last. Verizon’s network just emailed off cell records.
August 30th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
What makes the AOL leak so much worse (or weirder) is that the company released the information deliberately, as opposed to making a mistake the way Verizon did.
August 30th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
true that, plus more often than not people using AOL search are paying subscribers.