AOL's privacy breach last week was a big one that could have possibly disastrous legal implications, but the unveiling of very personal search data from over 600,000 of its users underscores how vast
the data is that is collected from us by search and other companies each day. The question now following this latest public relations debacle from the Time Warner unit is--can we trust big companies
holding such sensitive information? That search data, for example, is now accessible to anyone from identity thieves to jealous girlfriends to employers. Just last year, the government subpoenaed four
search companies--Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL--for their search data, and only Google refused. Now we know a little more about just how sensitive this data is; privacy advocates can say "We told you
so." One privacy group called this "Data Valdez," comparing AOL's blunder to Exxon's infamous oil spill. There's a lot about data collection that's unclear from the standpoint of the law. Nothing
expressly states that search data is off-limits to advertisers, law enforcement agencies, or academic researchers, for example. "This is a discussion that we as a society need to have," says Kevin
Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based rights organization. "I am very skeptical of any claims that the monetary worth of this information to these companies
is worth the privacy trade-off to millions of people," he says. That doesn't mean that advertisers aren't extremely interested in pushing ads to these people based on that data. As a result, privacy
hounds are barking louder than ever about whether or not giving such data to advertisers is appropriate--especially because, as the AOL incident shows us, that information can inadvertently be leaked.
Read the whole story at The New York Times »
