AOL Embarrasses Themselves and Their Users

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein in a statement apologizing for the release of sensitive query logs earlier this week. What AOL needs to worry about now is how angry and upset their subscribed users, and the general public will be.

In a very questionable move, AOL’s research site released search-log information from 658,000 of its users that spans from March through May of this year. News outlets have been relatively quiet on the issue, possibly due to concerns about those with bad intentions picking up on the news and coming up with ways they could exploit this data to their advantage.

However, this has not stopped blogs from spreading the news of AOL’s big mistake. The overwhelming sentiment has been negative, which does not help the company’s already-floundering public reputation. Though it has been making a transition towards offering some of its services for free, AOL has suffered from horrible PR in the form of surfacing horror stories about users trying to cancel their AOL accounts.

Though no usernames were released in the files, there is certainly enough data included that would allow motivated individuals to find ways to identify some of the people whose search logs have been made public. First and last names, street addresses, and social security numbers are among the things that were typed into the search queries of these 658,000 random AOL users.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch emphasizes the potential risks associated with this release of data by saying, “The most serious problem is the fact that many people often search on their own name, or those of their friends and family, to see what information is available about them on the net. Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with “buy ecstasy” and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless.”

Search queries involved everything from murder and child porn to doctors and television serial numbers. This clearly raises questions of how this data should be used by law enforcement, and whether information related to criminal intentions should be more accessible to them.

Also included in the reams of private search data is information about whether a user actually clicked on a search result, what that result was, and what spot the result held on the search results page.

Add this to the fact that this list will essentially become a very valuable keyword list to anyone interested in this kind of information, and it’s obvious that there is potential for many uses of this search query data. It’s also quite plausible that Google will feel part of the brunt of this faux pas.

This is because AOL’s search engine is based on Google’s search engine. So, it’s a virtual certainty that when the right (or wrong) hands get this data, that they will ride whatever key information they can find to help their PPC, SEO, and spam sites. This all means that Google will have more splogs to battle in the near future.

Identify theft is also a very real repercussion of AOL’s release of data, and if it becomes a threat that is realized there will surely be louder and more vehement outcries, not to mention lawsuits that will be thrown AOL’s way.

All of this is probably the tip of the iceberg. The data is mirrored online, and many visitors to the original research page already downloaded the query logs before AOL took down the site on Sunday night. As more people analyze the data, there could be new and further implications to AOL’s privacy error.

“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,” added the statement.

“Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.”

Sources:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-
massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/

http://news.com.com/AOL+apologizes+for+release+of+user+
search+data/2100-1030_3-6102793.html?tag=nefd.top

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/