AOL Apologizes for Releasing Search Data from 658,000 Users

Almost 2 weeks ago, AOL quietly released roughly 20 million search records from 658,000 users on their new AOL Research site. The data includes a number assigned to the anonymous user, the search term, the date and time of the search, and the website visited as a result of the search. Although AOL did not identify the users, some argue it is possible to combine search information to profile and possibly identify users.

This comes just months after the government requested all the search results conducted over a 1 week period from all the major search engines including AOL, Yahoo, and Google. Google was the only search engine that did not give in to the request. They took their case to court and eventually won.

AOL’s public release of the data went largely unnoticed for over a week until the story broke on Digg on Sunday. AOL pulled the data from their site and then apologized. However, they could not stop the data from being disseminated. Several torrents were set up and a few people have attempted to put web interfaces on the data. Some have reported finding very private and shocking results including possible illegal drug use, murder, suicide, medical information, names, addresses and social security numbers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has suggested that AOL has broken federal law and may be held financially liable.

Others suggest the hype is overblown—that the results really don’t reveal private data and can help researchers develop better search engines. Researchers have already used the data to produce at least one study to improve the efficiency of search engines. Still others suggest that the bloggers who publicized this story are "just as bad as [AOL]." Do search engines keep too much information or are the privacy concerns overblown?