Digg ThisI’m so glad I never used AOL.
I could never see the purpose in subscribing to a service that had to translate everything into other verbiage so that you had to learn two different names for the same thing, when the original name did just fine.
Not only that, but you had to pay more for AOL than almost any other ISP.
I always preferred my Internet raw: no middlemen, no translating services, no nothing. Just give me a browser and I’ll find what I find, thank you.
I’ll pay less for faster service, too (not to mention more polite customer service).
And I never trusted AOL, either. Too big. I have friends that have tried to cancel their service, only to have AOL offer them outrageous deals for them to stay. They made it virtually impossible to quit.
Horror stores I have heard even include continuing charges on their credit cards that went on for months after the service was actually cancelled.
None of this is new.
Now, AOL admits that it made a mistake by posting 20 million keyword searches from three months on their service.
Glorious.
I remember a while ago that a lot of folks got upset about the government asking Google to surrender their databased search results; now I think you can see why.
If you need advice about how to protect your privacy on the web, Wired published an excellent article back in January, with several more links for products, services, and tactics to protect yourself from prying eyes.
Button up.
