(Intelligencer) – The utter clumsiness of the overall design here is made more galling by its lack of purpose. Whom is this feed for? Does Meta imagine a feed of non sequitur slop will provide a solid foundation for a new social network?

Accidental, incidental, or, in Meta’s case, merely inexplicable privacy violations like this are rare and unsettling but almost always illuminating. In 2006, AOL released a trove of poorly anonymized search histories for research purposes, providing a glimpse of the sorts of intimate and incriminating data people were starting to share in search boxes: medical questions; relationship questions; queries on how to commit murder and other crimes; queries about how to make a partner fall back in love, followed shortly by searches for home-surveillance equipment. (Read More)