Anything You Search Can Be Used Against You in a Court Of Law: Data Mining in Search Archives

Blake Ives, Vlad Krotov
2006 Communications of the Association for Information Systems  
AOL's recent public release of user search information resulted in a heated privacy debate. This case study is a detailed account of this incident. The case is designed as an in-class teaching aid covering managerial, legal, and ethical issues related to privacy. It consists of four sections (A, B, C, and D). Each section is fairly short and is designed to be read in class, separated by discussion of the previous section. Alternatively, the first section might be distributed in advance; though
more » ... his runs the risk of students identifying the case and jumping ahead in the discussion (AOL's identity is concealed from students until the end of section B). A set of potential discussion questions for each section appears in the appendix. While there are too many questions to be covered in a single class, instructors can choose questions based on their particular teaching objective. A teaching note is also available from the authors. On May 30, 2006, three computer scientists presented a scholarly paper on information search behavior at a conference in Hong Kong. The paper, "A Picture of Search", described the trio's investigation of factors related to the efficiency and effectiveness of large-scale search services. Among these factors were (Pass et al., 2006) : 1. The nature of the users' search queries and how queries change over time. 2. How users form search queries. 3. How users interact with a search service. 4. The runtime efficiency of a search service. 5. The nature of search results produced. Who uses search engines? The findings reported that entertainment, shopping, and pornography were the most common queries, that a small percentage of users perform the majority of queries, and that a high proportion of the queries come from the east and west coasts of the United States (Pass et al., 2006) . Among the conclusions was the prediction that further research could produce invaluable improvements in large-scale search services.
doi:10.17705/1cais.01829 fatcat:tuoceuslhvhmlfv4fxuq2ttq54