User 927 is the anonymous, now-notorious AOL user whose search results were released along with 658,000 others by America Online in August 2006 in what is now known as the AOL search data scandal. AOL posted unabridged three-month search logs of a broad sampling of registered users on a parallel "research" site, but an outcry from the Internet community quickly prompted AOL to issue an official apology on August 7, 2006.
One product of the AOL scandal was the proliferation of blog entries examining the exposed data. Certain users' search logs were identified as humorous, disturbing, or even dangerous.
Consumer watchdog website The Consumerist posted an blog entry by editor Ben Popken identifying the anonymous user number 927 as having an especially chilling search history. The blog posting has since been viewed nearly 4,000 times and referenced on a number of other high-profile sites.
In addition to sparking the interest of the Internet community, User 927 inspired a theatrical production, written by Katharine Clark Gray in Philadelphia. The play, also named User 927, has since been cited on several of the same blogs that originally discovered the real user's existence.
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