“AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May (2006) is now public information on the internet.

“This was not a leak – it was intentional. In their desperation to gain recognition from the research community, AOL decided they would compromise their integrity to provide a data set that might become often-cited in research papers: “Please reference the following publication when using this collection…” is the message before the download.” The data appears to have been removed, but not before some 1000 people downloaded the 400 MB file. News is rom this page at CalTech, which is linked from digg and elsewhere.

The author goes on to point out there is plenty of information that can identify the users (searches on names, phone number, social security numbers et al.) and that this represents, to say the least, a blatant breach of privacy. Given tha AOL just announced it would transition from a paid service to a free, ad-supported portal, this seems to be an astonishing blunder. Who would use a service that is so cavalier with users’ personal data?

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