Execs at AOL Approved Release of Private Data? 156
reporter writes "The New York Times has published a report providing further details about the release of private AOL search queries to the public. According to the report: 'Dr. Jensen, who said he had worked closely with Mr. Chowdhury on projects for AOL's search team, also said he had been told that the posting of the data had been approved by all appropriate executives at AOL, including Ms. [Maureen] Govern.' The report also identifies the other two people whom AOL management fired: they are Abdur Chowdhury and his immediate supervisor. Chowdhury is the employee who did the actual public distribution of the private search queries. He, apparently, has retained a lawyer."
Internal AOL e-mails announcing new privacy plan (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Just because they approved it... (Score:1, Informative)
I can entirely believe that the execs didn't know the full implications of what they were looking at, or didn't have a clear idea of what could be done with the data. I'm sure that they cared that the data was anonymized, and it *was*, just not well enough.
However, even though they sometimes like to come off as knowing what they are talking about technically, execs didn't *need* to be able to project all the possible uses of the data set. The problem is that they did not ensure that it was referred to the right internal specialist agency that did know what could be done with it.
When this hit inside AOL, everyone was surprised by it. Initially the only alarm inside AOL was some calls where the NetOps people were saying that traffic had taken down a switch, and could you please investigate. At the same time, Operations Security opened an investigation because they thought there was an intrusion on the machine. The release of the data wasn't even really more than a blip on anyone's radar until some people started reading the news. The interest for this was supposed to be so low, that no one really even set up any sort of high bandwidth solution for it. It was just on a 100Mbit switch that had various other hosts on it. The flood of data from the requests actually took down a registration server on the same switch, which had an effect on other AOL services.
Everyone in Search, Ops and Dev, I talked to mentioned that this information had been demoed to the execs, which I assume included the CTO (Govern). I will say, though, that it is interesting that she has had to fall on her sword for this, because really, she's was the least likely exec in the company to have known the full privacy procedures, having been only recently hired and focused on Video Search. Not to mention with Video Searchbeing released, this is a really crappy time to lose the CTO.
Chowdhry was mentioned in discussions as probably the most likely person to be canned, but it's surprising that they actually did it, because he has a fairly decent footprint in the Search organization. I suppose he probably should have "known better", but I don't know if firing him was the best idea for the company.
People at AOL don't like how the execs are trying scapegoat people for this. Miller is trying to make a PR statement that "we got the bad apples". Well, none of those "apples" were "bad", as far as I can tell. The process is what failed, and AOL has a lot of process problems. Hopefully they decide to fix those without simply making us go to some stupid class about the existing process (which failed).
Anyway, looks like we'll be getting a new CTO... and I was just done unpacking from the last re-org (instituted by Govern). Fun times ahead.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, really? A couple of NY Times reporters didn't let that stop them. They used the search data to find and interview User No. 4417749, Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga. Link to story below. Bugmenot login works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09ao
Yes Im sure they did (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.blackboxsearch.com/ [blackboxsearch.com]