The New York Times has today published a photo of 62 year old Thelma Arnold of Lilburn, Ga. What makes Ms Arnold newsworthy? Nothing - except that she is AOL searcher number 4417749.

Last weekend AOL mistakenly released a huge file containing data on the searches performed by many of its users. This data was all, of course, entirely innocent and anonymous. So if the users had nothing to hide they clearly had nothing to fear.

Except that you can learn a lot from a seemingly innocuous data trail.

With very little effort the NY Times identified "Searcher 4417749" as Ms. Arnold. Her searches had included "numb fingers", "60 single men", "dog that urinates on everything", "landscapers in Lilburn, Ga" and "homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia".

At a stroke AOL had released online an entire picture of her life and those of her friends. Such is the power of a vast, centralised collection of seemingly trivial pieces of information. As Ms Arnold said: "I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder".


The UK government's proposed compulsory ID Card scheme with its central National Identity Register (NIR) won't hold details of your web searches. It will contain an audit trail with a record of every time your Identity Card is checked against the central database. This data won't even be anonymous - it will be recorded against your identity and even your intimate biometric data.

Imagine how detailed a picture of your life someone could obtain from that data, especially if, as Gordon Brown apparently wants, ID Cards become used in every walk of life.

When your NIR data falls - by accident or design - into the wrong hands your privacy will be compromised beyond repair. Anyone with access to that information will have a picture of your entire life far more complete than the one we have about 62 year old dog owning widow Thelma Arnold of Lilburn.


You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to lose.



Tags: AOL privacy ID Cards identity cards 4417749 NIR Gordon Brown Thelma Arnold