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Researchers Want to Use AOL Data, but Hesitant, Too

AOL's gaffe--releasing 660,000 of its users search data--overshadows the facts. The company was bringing that data to researchers so they could disseminate more information about users online activity to help advertisers reach them effectively. But now, that data is "sitting there, in cold storage," says Professor Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell. "The number of things it reveals about individual people seems much too much. In general, you don't want to do research on tainted data." It would have been one of the few times user data has been released to academic researchers, as opposed to corporate researchers. Raw data almost always remains locked inside large companies. The last time academia received search data was 10 years ago, and that data came from Excite and Alta Vista. Meanwhile, "a virtual eternity" in search years has elapsed. Still, researchers have mixed feelings about working with this data; some are excited about the prospect of learning more about personalization, others are reticent about working with such sensitive information. After all, you can divine an awful lot about someone by looking at their past search behavior.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »

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