• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, July 20, 2011

AOL's 'Data Valdez' often is held up as an example of how consumers can be identified based on supposedly anonymous data.

But is cookie-based data comparable to the three months' worth of individualized search queries? BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol says the answer is no. "Nobody ever in the history of the company ever took a cookie out and said, 'Ah ha, it's Steve,' " Tawakol said this morning at OMMA.

By contrast, when AOL released users' search queries, some of those people could be identified based solely on their queries even though AOL didn't release users' names or even their real IP addresses.

Tawakol adds that the company is working on figuring out how to prove that the cookie-based information it collects is anonymous.