Trilight Zone

[tricore]

Search engines have in their databases a vast amount of information about consumers. And that data is very appealing to all sorts of people, from researchers to marketers to the government.
AOL

That's why bloggers were in an uproar over the weekend after a research arm of AOL released a massive database of user queries--three months worth of search terms from 500,000 of the company's users. The goal was to provide a data set for search engine researchers.

The data was anonymized, and did not mention and specific users by name. And it appears AOL took the data down after complaints began flowing. But the very fact of its availability had privacy advocates enraged.