The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public.

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It turns out that de-identification is *fucking hard*. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficent to de-anonymize the user in question:

pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas…

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But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they *can* safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

theguardian.com/technology/201…

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'Anonymous' browsing data can be easily exposed, researchers reveal

A journalist and a data scientist secured data from three million users easily by creating a fake marketing company, and were able to de-anonymise many users

^{Alex Hern (The Guardian)}

Indeed, it appears that there may be *no* way to truly de-identify a data-set:

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/article…

Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/…

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets:

cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publ…

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Understanding the maths is crucial for protecting privacy

Publishing data can bring benefits, but it also can be a great risk to privacy

^{Dr Chris Culnane (The University of Melbourne)}

But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the…

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But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who *run* these companies and design their products seem to have *no clue* as to how their users *use* those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anony…

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Fitness App's 'Anonymized' Data Dump Accidentally Reveals Military Bases Around the World

People around the world use the app Strava on their smartphones and Fitbits to track how far they run. But researchers have discovered that an

^{Matt Novak (Gizmodo)}

Or Venmo, which, by default, lets *anyone* see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technol…

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Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

arstechnica.com/information-te…

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Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world

Etsy—a site where crafters and artists sell their goods—has found itself at …

^{Jacqui Cheng (Ars Technica)}

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook…

Facebook didn't just publish this - they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie.

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They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson.

Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner.

Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-…

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The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster | TechCrunch

Meta does not indicate to users what their privacy settings are as they post, or where they are even posting to. So, if you log into Meta AI with Instagram, and your Instagram account is public, then so too are your searches.

^{Amanda Silberling (TechCrunch)}

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. *Techcrunch*'s Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found:

* "An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'"

* "people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion"

* "[whether family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes"

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* "how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included."

While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

twitter.com/racheltobac/status…

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There's no warning about the privacy settings for your prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women."

As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology.

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The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

wheresyoured.at/measures/

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue - cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

locusmag.com/2023/12/commentar…

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Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Next year is going to be big. Well, I personally don't think it'll be big, but if you ask the AI industry, here's the things that will happen by the end of 2026: * According to the Financial Times, OpenAI's Stargate data center …

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

Those standalone models were released as toys by companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that - despite the worst unit economics of any techn in living memory - these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight:

nature.com/articles/d41586-025…

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How China created AI model DeepSeek and shocked the world

Government policies, generous funding and a pipeline of AI graduates have helped Chinese firms create advanced LLMs.

^{Mallapaty, Smriti}

I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

charliehealth.com/post/cbt-jou…

And the invention of chatbots was *instantly* followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_ef…

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tendency to assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_…

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/div…

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The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can - and do - lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

rollingstone.com/culture/cultu…

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections.

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AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

^{Miles Klee (Rolling Stone)}

The keyword here, though, is *private*. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doc…

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AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, *ever* trust them with *any* private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

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Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-…

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types.

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But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the *instant* a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer *are* priviiliged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information.

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