Try as I may, I can't seem to work up much sympathy for America Online. The huge service provider has shown a remarkable ability to shoot itself in the foot, its latest gaffe being the inadvertent release of search information from 658,000 of its subscribers. To its credit, AOL's apology was quick and straightforward, but also too late to do much good, since the downloadable file containing 21 million search queries was soon circulating on the Internet.

A privacy issue? You bet.

With this data, you can see what the owners of individual AOL accounts searched for over a three-month period. Not that AOL linked names to search queries (they went with serial numbers instead), but putting the information together makes it possible to tell a lot about a particular user. People who search for their own name on the Net to see what's being written about them can be linked to searches associated with that name.

I'm looking at some of this stuff as I write and the degree of specificity is amazing. People paint their portraits by asking for information about their hobbies, cars they might buy, places they work, local events, restaurants and sports. And, of course, they make more personal queries that I'm sure most would rather not have tied to their name. I can only imagine (and dread) how marketers will put this latest find to use.

What's more telling is that Google, when asked to divulge similar information by the Department of Justice, planted its feet and said, "no." Its right to do so was later upheld by a federal judge.

America Online, which is in the midst of an overhaul that will see many of its services offered for free, has now painted itself as lax in security just when it needs an influx of new subscribers. Add to that its history of customer service problems and bloated software and you can see why many AOLers are considering alternatives.

As to the searches, why is there an automatic pass for researchers and marketers?

AOL says it was trying to share these queries with the academic community, but data abuse is a growing problem, and it will only get worse. Can we for once make life harder rather than easier for data miners and simply set up search engines so they delete queries as they come in?

I'll take enhanced privacy over yet another sociologist's study of crowd behavior any day.

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As students head back to the classroom, an online note-taking service has surfaced that makes sharing school materials easy.

The site is stu.dicio.us -- you type it into the browser just as shown -- and it seems a useful tool for written information in a public format, keeping up with to-do lists and managing a class schedule.

The interface is bare-bones simple, but new features are coming as of September 1, including a 1 gigabyte file manager to save documents on the Web and integration with the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

The premise here is that classwork and study time are increasingly online activities, and the number of students I see with laptops seems to validate that. Working on shared projects online becomes easy with the stu.dicio.us note-taker, an outline-based program that lets you make structured lists with deeper content accessible at any level; any note can then be saved in HTML or as a Word document and everyone's notes can be searched.

It's simple, straightforward and useful for students and teachers alike.

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An education of a different sort is provided by Elizabeth Grossman's new book "High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health" (Island Press, $25.95). We talk endlessly about the benefits of high tech but rarely examine the physical cost. What happens to all that lead found in TV and computer monitors? What happens to all the toxic waste created in the production of the microchips that make our cell phones, PCs and iPods operate?

Grossman has the answer, and it isn't pretty.

The average PC, for example, doesn't pose a problem sitting on your desk. But throw your CRT screen into a landfill and lead and other heavy metals can get into the environment. Beryllium dust from circuit boards can cause lung disease.

Grossman points out that flame retardants used in plastic components are in some cases released while the equipment is still intact; traces of these have shown up in human blood, and the materials involved are known to have detrimental effects on animals.

Proper PC disposal takes longer than people expect, but donating them for reuse is the best option, a partial solution but just one of many discussed in this eye-opening book.