Privacy Group Assails AOL For Mistake
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
By: Christopher Heun

Information Week - 8/9/06 - The World Privacy Forum, an advocacy group, blasted AOL for mistakenly releasing data about 20 million search queries conducted by roughly 658,000 of its users during a three month period from March to May. The records, posted on a company Web page from July 31 to August 6, do not include personally identifiable information. The company has acknowledged, however, that search queries themselves can sometimes include personal information.

The WPF called AOL's mistake "a gross violation of its users'privacy" and said that some of the search queries that were released did in fact include individuals' names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, addresses and insurance and banking information.

...The privacy group, which said Tuesday it would file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, noted that the search data included the precise time when the searches were conducted and when users clicked through search results to specific Web domains, making it possible for some Web sites to correlate the AOL records with their internal Web logs and identify some people "to varying degrees."  

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