EFF Files Complaint with FTC Over AOL Data Leak

Quincy A. writes "Last week's exposure of search data on over 500,000 AOL users was a gigantic embarrassment for the company. It may be about to get worse, as the EFF has filed a complaint with the FTC over the incident. 'Citing AOL's own Network Privacy Policy, the EFF says that the company failed to "implement reasonable and appropriate measures to protect personal consumer information from public disclosure."' Among other things, the complaint asks AOL to notify all users affected by the data disclosure via certified mail and provide free credit monitoring for a year."

I've been meaning to make a donation.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm demonstrating my support, I thought I'd suggest some of you do the same.

Have you shown your support? EFF [eff.org]

Re:So EFF stands for the free exchange of informat

[Recovering Hater]

No, troll. From their main page : "What is EFF? EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people -- lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries -- working to protect your digital rights.

Re:Why credit monitoring?

[GoRK]

Why should AOL have to provide free credit monitoring? Did the search information include Social Secuirity Numbers, home addresses, mother's maiden name (and identifiable as such), PINs, or some other sort of data that could be used to affect someone's credit report? If not, then what reason is there to ask for credit monitoring?

Really have you not heard about this? The data absolutely did contain exactly this sort of data.

Re:Why credit monitoring?

[budgenator]

Did the search information include Social Secuirity Numbers, home addresses, mother's maiden name (and identifiable as such), PINs, or some other sort of data that could be used to affect someone's credit report?
YES, many people run their personaly identifiable information through a search engine; don't you think that if google indexed a text file that was a dump of some perloined database on eveilhacker.com you'd want to know about it? For me for a search engine to turn over search queries is serious breach of confidence; I could never use Yahoo, MSN, or AOL for anything beyond trivial searches now, and I only use yahoo for yellowpages skimming at work.

Relief doesn't match mistake

[dysk]

Yes, AOL made a mistake by releasing that information. They've admitted to the mistake, apologized, and I doubt anyone will try to do this again.

On the other hand, one needs to recognize that they didn't release the information for the purposes of making money, or defrauding the customers, or anything else. They collected the data in order to help a researcher write an extremely informative paper[pdf] [iit.edu] about human behavior as it relates to searches. That researcher decided that other's might benefit from the information, and convinced AOL to make it publically available. It turns out that that was a huge lapse in judgement, but nonetheless, intentions are also important and while criticizing AOL, we should also complement them for their effort to interface with the academic community.

AOL has been punished enough in the press. Given the circumstances I don't think that any legal action is necessary.

Re:While I am surprised the EFF took the case

[merreborn]

The mysqlimport command.

http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlimport.htm l [mysql.com]

Re:While I am surprised the EFF took the case

[Neil Blender]

If the file has say, 5 columns that are tab delimited - make a table with five columns of the appropriate type

Then use this statement:

load data infile '/path/to/file/file.txt' into table name_of_table;

Tab delimited is the default delimiter for that statement but you can change it.

And as someone who regularly works with this amount of data - dump grep, sed and awk and learn Perl. It is way, way faster and is exactly the tool for this kind of job. Oh, and put an index on your search term column.