Unqualified Offerings

Paradigm Shift lists one of the searches in AOL’s released data, for user 17556639:

17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife
17556639 poop
17556639 dead people
17556639 pictures of dead people
17556639 killed people
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 murder photo
17556639 steak and cheese
17556639 photo of death
17556639 photo of death
17556639 death
17556639 dead people photos
17556639 photo of dead people
17556639 www.murderdpeople.com
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crash photo

Book him! As the blogger asks

I ask you why is it that americans have no problems arresting people that are planning or researching how to conduct terrorist attacks?  Yet if a person plans on killing his wife that is ok, until he actually does it?   How many people do you have to plan on killing before its ok for a company like AOL to hand your records over to the government? I am not taking sides,  I’m just pointing out the obvious double standard.

Well, I agree it’s either a double standard or a slippery slope.  Here’s a guy who obviously wants to kill specific person,  though admittedly not a bunch of people. At the very least, he’s a total sicko!
Unless he’s writing a mystery novel. Or looking for aids for a roleplaying game scenario. Or trying to verify alarmist claims about the sort of stuff you can find on the internet. Or a blogger or journalist looking for background for an item on some current criminal case she’s covering. Or a researcher for Happy Tree Friends trying to get the details right. Maybe the search itself functions as catharsis. Or something I haven’t thought of yet.

So the guy might be a clear and present danger to his spouse, or he might be some large number of other things. What to do about the mere existence of the data, out there somewhere.

We could require search engines to report such clusters of data to law enforcement preemptively. Presumably this wouldn’t mean the user gets locked up or arrested just for searching; rather, police would open an investigation to see if there are other indications the guy is engaging in conspiracy to commit murder, which is a felony. The problem here is that major police departments tend to be understaffed, with plenty of unsolved murders and robberies going uninvestigated now. (Often, the only reason to report a crime is to meet insurance requirements.) The law places strict limits on what police can do preemptively even in the case of long-familiar meatspace phenomena like stalking.

There might be some real safety value in informing the wife of her husband’s hobbies. This is offset by the mistrust you might sow if the husband’s motives fall somewhere on the spectrum of innocent ones sketched a few paragraphs ago.
You could hold the search data inviolate even in the case of a criminal investigation police began for other reasons. Or you could treat it like other personal effects subject to search and seizure with probable cause pursuant to a warrant, like the contents of homes and safe deposit boxes and so on.

I tend to favor the last. There’s a risk here too, which is prosecutors using search results to buttress a weak case by trying to make the defendant seem so weird the jury will convict out of distaste.

Via God of the Machine’s excellent sidebar. (And not just because I’m in it.)