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."
retained a lawyer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ask former President Clinton. Ask Bush after he concludes this term.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps because being fired is a whole lot worse than quitting voluntarily... and more importantly, lets them avoid giving you the severance pay they would otherwise owe.
Personally, I know that if I were told by my boss to do something and then got fired for doing it, I'd be extremely pissed!
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, if he doesn't want to work there, he can quit. There is a huge difference in being able to tell a prospective employeer that you quit because of the culture of blame-passing, and having to tell them you were fired because you released private data to the public.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're President of the United States, you don't really have any recourse when Congress (a co-equal branch) starts issuing subpoenas, nor are similar jobs readily available.
Nice bad analogy, though.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:3, Insightful)
That of course, is assuming that he really is as innocent in all of this as he claims to be.
Re:Who the hell cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Partner this up with the fact the some people may search for the name, credit card number, and social security number to see if they're posted anywhere, you have some serious privacy concerns.
Take for example, (and I'm making this up), user #5, these are his search terms:
Joe Schmo
014-56-1234
4729-1234-5678-9012
Pizza stores near 1 main street, oakland, CA
Would you want this released to the public? What if some more of his search terms were:
How to divorce your wife
divorce lawyers
dating websites
how to cheat on your wife
russian brides
Ok, granted maybe you don't agree with what he's doing here, but is it right for this to be public??
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:2, Insightful)
At a former job, we got a contract with the Navy to put our computer system on an aircraft carrier. One employee quit rather than work on a system that would be used to help kill people. Although I didn't have any qualms about that particular application, I understood her stand.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know of one senior guy who worked for a well known credit card company. He was brought in to cut costs. On day one all the department heads were brought in one by one. He ignored everyone's plans and spreadsheets and just gave them a slip of paper with 500k, 1 million or whatever written on it and said 'that's your budget'. A few months later he had another 35m to lose and noticed a single dept that cost that. He ordered it shut down and the staff made redundant. Within a few months the company's income was in freefall - he'd sacked their most profitable sales team. He had to go grovelling to the board to explain, rehire as many as he could at inflated salaries and was then fired. You can bet his CV reads 'Worked for xxxxx, achieved 70 million cost cuts'
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, don't let that small difference in scale dissuade you from bringing Godwin's Law into effect.
AOL did not provide any of the information necessary to identify the searchers. So while I disagree with the disclosure, this breach of privacy is on par with other acts of corporate idiocy I've seen, and based on that I would say that there wasn't any basis requiring him to refuse this order. There's no clear and compelling need to disobey an approved transfer of more-or-less anonymous data, unlike a situation where someone is ordered to kill innocent civilians by the truckful.
Finally, get a sense of proportion. Are you seriously comparing a poor privacy decision with a decision on a life-and-death matter? Tenuously exaggerated examples do not shore up tenuously supported arguments.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Each branch only has as much power as it chooses to exercise.
Re:Possible Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Not even close to that simple. AOL didn't stand to make any money off this situation. The data was provided entirely "altruistically" for the benefit of researchers.
And what are these researchers "researching"? They are studying how to make searches more relevant, among other things.
Will more relevant searching make a buck for someone? Well, it's done wonders for Google, but the release of this data isn't making that research an AOL property. And we love Google because it gives us what we want to see up front, without digging for it.
In the end, the release of this data is a good thing, but the implementation of the release failed badly. Nevertheless, we *want* this data to get out, we just don't want it to get out in any way that can tag individuals.
Nuremberg analogy is valid (Score:2, Insightful)
Today the "little guy's" only defense against being taken advantage of by major corporations and the government is information and the ability to think for himself. A major problem, though, is that even those few trying to think for themselves are at the mercy of the information they are given. That's the information on which they base their decisions. The more corporations and governments know about what we are interested in and find important, the more they can tailor the information we receive to influence in their direction.
Classic marketing and academic research isn't the issue here. The issue is our ability to choose. This is the same reason the Net Neutrality issue matters, because it can directly affect our ability to find good (useful, true) information. Even if these issues weren't considered when the data was released (and I'm sure they were), such sharing of personal data amounts to criminal negligence when caring for other people's quality of life, and yes, lives. Because among the people using this information are people who directly affect our ability to live and yet seem to be driven more by monetary concerns, such as pharmaceutical companies.
Re:Possible Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bit cynical, don't you think?
If they really wanted to make the most money possible, they would have sold these logs (non-anonymized) to the scores of direct marketers that I'm sure would love to have this data. Instead, they packaged it up and tried to make it available to academic researchers. These researchers honestly just want to make better search engines that run faster and return better results. Furthermore, when academics come up with a great new idea, it gets published so that anyone can read it.
Every once in a while, someone suggests an open source search engine. Check out Nutch [nutch.org] if you want to see work in this area. However, if open source search solutions are going to be any good at all, they'll have to rely on the decades of public, published information retrieval research that's already out there.
We are entering a time when companies are capable of totally outpacing academia because they have query log data, so they know exactly what users actually do. There is no way that an academic can get this kind of data unless a company releases it. Researchers at AOL, in good faith, tried to release data so researchers could have a chance at success. Ultimately, of course, that's good for AOL since they're not in the top three search engines out there. Public research can only help raise AOL's standing by helping to level the playing field. But, it's good for you too, because you can build your open source solution based on this research too.
Yes, the release was botched, and yes, the long term user identifiers were a mistake. But don't make AOL out to be some evil company that was only out to destroy your privacy. They made a mistake!
Re:It just wants to be free! (Score:3, Insightful)
The Real Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The real problem is that they shouldn't have been keeping it in the first place!
If it can harm a consumer by its release, then it can harm that same consumer by the fact that the have it in their possession in the first place. Just how is AOL that much better or more trustworthy than the world at large?
Re:Nuremberg analogy is valid (Score:1, Insightful)
The Nuremberg trials were judged by others, not the Nazi's themselves.
This guy did what his company told him to do, and then got fired by that same company.
He is responsible to the public for what he did, however he is NOT responsible to the company since he was following a directive. The responsibility falls on his boss if he approved it.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:3, Insightful)
I recall similar defenses were raised at Nuremberg, and didn't go over very well.
Shut the fuck up about Nuremburg! Releasing anonymized search data is not the same as shovelling people into ovens!