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."
Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
Not at all sure about why they thought it was a good idea, they must have thought the ID numbers were sufficient to conceal identities which also shows the lack of security knowledge most executives have.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Sacked for gross incompetence
- Left after being used as a scapegoat
The point of most unfair dismissal actions is not the money, it's the CV.Re:Who the hell cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're wrong.
The IP address or user name of the person who searched has been removed, but it was replaced with a unique identifier that tracked all of the searches by the same person.
Many people search for things related to themselves. For example, if you have looked for a job in the last four years, you were foolish if you didn't search for your own name to see if your friends' blogs had descriptions of your late-night drinking binges and drug use. (You are probably foolish if you used AOL search to do this, but that's a different discussion.)
CNN ran a story where they were able to track down one older lady, just because she searched for her last name, searched for "drugstores near " or somesuch, and was the only person in her area with that name. They confirmed with her that the searches were hers. (She has a dog with problems urinating on her carpet, and she has friends with lots of diseases that she "researches" for them.) They picked someone to track down who hadn't searched for anything "naughty", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have if they had wanted to.
Re:retained a lawyer? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's when documenting your work is important. As a lead tester at Atari a few years ago, I was in situations that I could've been fired for except all my documentation pointed back to management. When a new boss told me to stop doing that, I told him I would not. Then it became a cat-and-mouse game for the next six months as he tried to get me fired without getting himself fired in the process. I eventually left on my own for "personal reasons" and it turned out I was the third person out of a dozen senior testers to leave that year when my boss became the department manager.
Re:Who the hell cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it okay to use the data anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
"I think the release of this data is a breach of privacy and should never have been made public. But
Then they present their analysis. My question is if you are going to preach on the evils of releasing the data then do you have the moral right to analyze it? I think not.
It's the x-refs, not the data. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a society, or at least as a subset of one, we need to discuss this. Where should the "expectation of privacy" be when one is using a search engine (or the Internet in general)? It's a very open question.
On one hand, most people I think realize that the query to the search engine is not 'private.' As in, you can go and view at any given time, all the things that are being typed in to Google. (At least you used to be able to, or maybe this was Yahoo.) At any rate, the queries themselves are not secret.
However, what freaks people out is that one query can be associated with another. So if I type in my name, I expect that somebody on the far end knows that I'm searching for my name. However, what people don't expect, is that it's possible to link together all the searches that they've made (potentially across multiple computers, if there's a login system). So that my search for my name today, could be cross-referenced with my search for restaurants in a particular area tomorrow, and cross-referenced further with some street address I search for the day after that.
Individually, only a very naive person would expect a query to be private. However, it's the cross-referenced information sorted by particular users that is concievably private, because it reveals much more than simple queries do.
Let's imagine for instance that AOL had released the same number of searches, but instead of listing the IP address (or a unique identifier that's matched 1:1 with an IP address) they just gave a time/date stamp when it was made. We probably wouldn't be having this conversation, and a few executives would still have their jobs.
Where people expect some sort of privacy (reasonably or not) is in not having one particular "search session" linked to other ones. In fact, I bet that most un-technical people probably think that they can close their browser, and thus 'start over'...not realizing that when they start searching again, it just continues adding to a list of queries from earlier. That "recordkeeping" is where the perceived invasion occurs, not in the lack of secrecy of the terms themselves.