AOL: Releasing Subscribers' Searches a 'Screw up'
Source:
http://www.marketingvox.com
AOL published online, and quickly took down, data on the internet search terms of more than 650,000 subscribers.
Intended as a gesture to researchers, the data that AOL released Monday was of searches entered over a three-month period, writes the Associated Press. Though AOL had substituted number for searchers' names, many of the queries contained information that could be used to deduce the searcher's identity. AOL admitted that releasing the data was a privacy breach and that publishing it was a mistake.
The "mistake" was first noticed by Adam D'Angelo - and news of it almost immediately spread throughout the blogosphere, as did copies of the file that AOL posted, though it has removed the original.
"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein is quoted by the AP as saying. "It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."
Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the technology watchdog group Center for Democracy and Technology, is quoted as saying search engines should re-evaluate why they even retain such data.
http://www.marketingvox.com
AOL published online, and quickly took down, data on the internet search terms of more than 650,000 subscribers.
Intended as a gesture to researchers, the data that AOL released Monday was of searches entered over a three-month period, writes the Associated Press. Though AOL had substituted number for searchers' names, many of the queries contained information that could be used to deduce the searcher's identity. AOL admitted that releasing the data was a privacy breach and that publishing it was a mistake.
The "mistake" was first noticed by Adam D'Angelo - and news of it almost immediately spread throughout the blogosphere, as did copies of the file that AOL posted, though it has removed the original.
"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein is quoted by the AP as saying. "It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."
Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the technology watchdog group Center for Democracy and Technology, is quoted as saying search engines should re-evaluate why they even retain such data.
posted by John Tredor at 8:47 PM
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