Commentary

Just An Online Minute... Privacy Concerns Mount After AOL's Gaffe

An AOL employee's hare-brained decision to release search histories for 658,000 users continues to ripple through the Web, as people are beginning to realize the full ramifications of this sort of so-called "anonymous" data becoming public.

Consider, it apparently took The New York Times less than three days to track down Thelma Arnold, formerly known as "User No. 4417749," interview and photograph her--and she was just one of many thousands the paper undoubtedly could have unmasked (though it's unclear how many others had search histories pristine enough that they'd have agreed to be outed in the press, as Arnold did).

AOL has apologized for the release of data, but the company has yet to detail exactly how this idiotic mistake happened. So far, the explanation is that the company wanted to reach out to researchers and academics, so someone working on that project posted the data on a publicly available Web site.

Why someone at AOL--presumably someone in a position of authority--decided that it was OK to share search histories with "researchers," let alone post that data online, remains unknown.

But the fact that it happened certainly indicates that consumers' privacy rights aren't front and center in AOL's corporate culture.

Meanwhile, Google's Eric Schmidt yesterday said the company was not going to stop collecting data about individual searchers. "We are reasonably satisfied ... that this sort of thing would not happen at Google, although you can never say never," Schmidt said," according to the Associated Press.

For a company with the motto "do no evil," this response seems awfully cavalier. Google and other search companies need to seriously rethink whether keeping detailed data that's obviously personally identifiable--at least according to the dictionary definition of those words--is worth the risk of exposing the privacy of millions of consumers.

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