How to respond to AOL's creepy search records release

If you haven't heard yet, AOL released three months of search data for 650,000 of their subscribers. They hid the names, but they used unique identifiers, so people can still be tracked down. Some of the searches are pretty disturbing, for a variety of reasons, and lives will be ruined because there's enough information to figure out that they had once attempted suicide, cheated on their spouses, or put their private information into the search box. It's such an egregious breach of privacy that AOL's official response was extremely clear: "We're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize." That doesn't help the victims much, though.

I'm seriously thinking about typing things into Google periodically that will help throw people off if they try to identify me by my search terms (not that it'll help much; most people probably search for enough identifiable information that they could be located).

Any suggestions for who my alter ego should be? Should I be an old woman in Portland that loves to buy gifts for her grandchildren? A Muslim dude in Colorado? A New Jersey secretary worried about her boss's sexual advances? A hardcore Republican from Omaha that wants to see naked pictures of Ann Coulter? Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Ideally, someone will write a simple program that puts together a list of search terms based on user-specified data and sends a couple of queries in to Google every day at random intervals. That way, I wouldn't have to remember to do it myself. I think everyone should seriously consider doing this. Hopefully someone will release a script or something; it seems like it should be very easy to program. A friend of mine thinks he can throw something together in his free time, but he said he didn't have much experience with that kind of scripting. I bet that someone at Reddit can put a great little search bot together.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, personal, web