• August 8, 2006

AOL found itself on the defensive Monday, after it came to light that the company had publicly released all search queries of about 650,000 AOL members between March and May. AOL had posted the information about 10 days ago, but the data went largely unnoticed until the weekend, when bloggers first found it.

By Sunday night, AOL had taken down the site, but by that time Web users had made and posted copies of the data. AOL Monday apologized for the incident. "This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," stated the company. "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."

The data was posted to a public Web site, but users were identified only by a number and not by name. Still, many Internet observers hold that searches can give away clues to users' identities, especially since users often search for their own names. This issue came up recently in a federal court case, when Google fought a subpoena for search queries from the U.S. Department of Justice. A federal judge in that case ruled that the queries need not be turned over to the authorities because users expected that their searches would be kept private.