Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/06/google_trawls_chat/
Google trawls chat
Ask not for whom the bot crawls - it crawls for thee
Posted in Media, 6th November 2003 20:09 GMT
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Yesterday's satire sometimes turns out to be tomorrow's news. Last year Brian Del Vecchio, a systems engineer, created a stir with a spoof Google site which added an extra tab called "AIMsearch". The spoof explained:
"In November of 2001 AOL Time Warner, responding to a subpoena from Attorney General John Ashcroft, made available to the Justice Department a complete archive of all private conversations held over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Through the power of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Google was able to obtain a copy of this entire logfile, totaling over 2 terabytes of conversations previously thought to be private."
"This unique resource provides insight into the minds of potential anti-American terrorists, cheating spouses, and countless computer neophytes."
(The pages were removed after a legal request from Google but the correspondence [1] lives on.)
This month many users of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) have noticed increased activity from Google's servers.
"Since things said in chat rooms are traditionally considered very private, I can't imagine what they plan to do," says Aaron Swartz, a young programmer who runs a Google fan blog.
Indeed, IRC has been historically useful, or notorious, depending on how you look at it, for exchanging files [2]. Google's bots don't stay around long enough to make comprehensive indexes of the conversations, users tell us. Google sent a polite note back to one query, explaining that the behavior is part of an experiment, but confirming that it is [3] search related.
However IRC privacy has always been something of a contradiction. ISPs routinely log IRC chat sessions, and by nature, Microsoft and TimeWarner store chat room archives. It'a tribute to the power of fluffy marketing (think: colored balls) that so far, the reaction has been one of unease and curiosity. How IRC users would react to a bot from microsoft.com is an exercise left to the reader. ®
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Google calls time on AIMSearch [5]
Google - the only archive we'll ever need? [6]