Web queries offer clues to personal data!! interesting

Don Fullman finished off a cinnamon roll and iced tea at the St. Louis Bread Co. in Winchester on Friday morning and talked about some of the things he's looked up recently on the Internet.

Bile duct cancer, aneurysms, substance abuse.

"If you took that out of context . . . it would look like I'm a wreck and I'm not going to live much longer," said Fullman, a self-described healthy 60-year-old from Ballwin, whose laptop computer sat open on the table. "If that's winding up under my name personally, that's a little scary."

Many people might not realize that every time they enter a word or phrase into an online search engine, they leave behind a trail of clues about themselves. "You are turning over when you do searches . . . . a lot of information," said Ari Schwartz, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit public policy organization. "It seems as though you're just dealing with a computer, but in reality, on the other side, that information will be stored and collected. We forget that sometimes."

The public got a sharp reminder recently when AOL, an Internet service company, released more than 20 million search queries made by 658,000 customers over a three-month period.

AOL posted the data on its research site in late July as part of what a spokesman called "an innocent enough attempt" to provide academic researchers with information to help develop new search-related tools.

To provide anonymity, the data assigned numbers rather than names to users. But many queries provided plenty of hints that made it easy to identify many of those seeking the information. Some were obvious, like names, Social Security numbers and addresses. Others are more of a road map, such as interests, local businesses, medication, doctors.

"It was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said in a prepared statement.

The company, based in Dulles, Va., pulled the data Aug. 6 and apologized.