Dude... who the heck is Eric Schwartz?? the bastard child of Eric Schmidt and Jason Schwartz??

CEO Eric Schwartz?

I am not sure which is creepier - keeping all these records non-encrypted or people's glee at digging in the dirt.

Not to spoil the Schadenfreude of non-AOL users, but large data sets as the one released have been used in the research community for long, long time. True, these are hard to obtain being considered in a way 'know-how'. Unfortunately this is the only reason why they have been handled comparatively sensitively up until now. But rest assured that all your not_necessarily_AOL search queries, SMSs, online activity traces together with respective IPs, phone localities are in the hands of not very trustworthy individuals that may or may not choose to use these to their advantage or sheer malice at some point. Or may or may not leave their intended safe storage with a disgruntled grad student some day. Also quite possible, while idly occupying space on servers at universities favourited by script kiddies and wannabe hackers - be duplicated and consequently released in the wild.

As long as there aren't any enforced regulations as to how information is being exactly "owned" (for instance credit cards records being jointly owned by the cc company and the individual) and thus governed, as long as encryption is being treated as something exotic, there will be gross privacy violations like the one with AOL.

I apologize for the rather long comment.