AOL on Huge, Inadvertent Release of User Search Data: “Whoops!”
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Written By Reprise Media | August 7, 2006 | Share This
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AOL users, take note: the company seems a bit lax with your search info. Having voluntarily turned some over to the Justice Department a few months ago, they accidentally let loose a torrent of private search data ten days ago. That’s when the search queries used by 658,000 AOL subscribers were posted to a public AOL webpage; they were taken down only yesterday, hours after a blog post by Michael Arrington, but the file containing the info is still floating around the ‘net.
The data appeared on AOL’s new Research site, with exhortations to cite the source of the information if it was used in another publication. AOL claims that the release of the data was unintentional, according to News.com. An AOL statement apologized profusely for the “screw up,” announced the launch of an internal probe, and all but promised that heads would roll. Here’s a snip:
“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.”
We’re not sure how many instants there are in ten days, but we think it’s probably a lot.
So what got out, exactly? Users themselves were not identified by name in the, uh, leaked data (each was assigned a number). But, says Arrington, “The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period, as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the result page.” He points out the you could probably identify many searchers based on the propensity of folks to enter their own names (and those of family and friends) into search engines. That’s bad news for folks who were searching on AOL between March and May; 1.5 percent of AOL search data from then is now a matter of public record.
Topics: Search: News |
Yes, try out the AOL search database yourself. It is just fun to look at some of the search data.
http://data.aolsearchlogs.com/log/random.cgi