On Monday it was revealed that AOL’s chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, had resigned from her post in the aftermath of the company’s privacy mishap. The researcher who posted the data online and the researcher’s supervisor were also fired, bringing the casualty total to three.
An e-mail addressed to employees was sent by Chief Executive Jon Miller on Monday, and said that Govern “has decided to leave AOL effective immediately.”
Govern was hired for her position last September, and will be replaced temporarily by John McKinley, who is president of AOL Digital Services and was AOL’s CTO from 2003 to 2005.
The other two employees went unnamed in public reports.
Miller wrote, “After the great lengths we’ve taken to build our members’ trust and be an industry leader on privacy, it was disheartening to see so much good work destroyed by a single act. This incident took place because some employees did not exercise good judgment or review their proposal with our privacy team. We are taking appropriate action with the employees who were responsible.”
In a separate e-mail Miller indicated that AOL would be taking measures to prevent similar blunders from happening again. A group will be formed to create best practices concerning privacy and to review how long search and other privacy-sensitive data should be saved.
These recent personnel changes come after huge damage dealt to AOL’s public reputation since the event. Within days of the posting of the data, the New York Times was able to identify a user by just analyzing her search queries.
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the World Privacy Forum filed complaints against AOL with the Federal Trade Commission.
The EFF’s complaint beckoned the FTC to look at AOL’s potential violations to its privacy policy and federal law, and to demand AOL to inform all users affected by the data release, and to refrain from keeping search logs unless the case is special.
The World Privacy Forum’s complaint charged AOL of releasing user search logs in 2004.
“I don’t think firing employees is going to be a solution to the problem,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. “It appears that these data disclosures were a symptom of a more systemic problem at AOL regarding data handling policies and practices. The ‘tip of the iceberg’ may well apply here; it will be up to the FTC to find this out, though.”
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, goes a step further. “AOL could do a real service to the online community if it would commit to permanently (deleting) all personal search details and challenge other search companies to do the same.”
Of course, AOL can never come up with a solution that will please all of its users and everyone concerned with search engine privacy issues. Firing employees involved could stir up its own employees and make them keener to these issues, but it will do little to nothing for its public reputation.
The only thing AOL can really hope for is some credit for pushing the issues associated with search engine logs into the public limelight, and for furthering the public’s education about how the issue directly affects them. Of course, this recognition will likely come at a huge cost to the shrinking Internet giant.
Sources:
http://news.com.com/Three+workers+depart+AOL
+after+privacy+uproar/2100-1030_3-6107830.
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