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Published online 10 October 2007 | Nature 449, 644-645 (2007) | doi:10.1038/449644a
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Data sharing threatens privacy
Analyses of personal information raise spectre of Big Brother.
When web provider AOL's research division published an analysis of search behaviour on the Internet last year1, it had what it thought was a bright idea: it would reach out to academics by making an anonymized version of the data freely available for download from its website. But within hours, it had to pull the site, after bloggers managed to infer many identities from the data and view the associated search histories.
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