Confessions in the Cloud: How Big Tech Keeps Broadcasting Your Secrets

In the summer of 2006, AOL pulled off the digital equivalent of accidentally dropping 650,000 diaries into Times Square and then acting surprised when people started reading them.

The company, then still a lumbering relic from the dial-up era, had a brilliant idea: let’s hand over an entire trove of user search histories to researchers, all in the name of “innovation.” Who could resist the opportunity to improve search algorithms by leaking a searchable blueprint of the American psyche?