AOL responds to data leak. They screwed up.
 |
This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.
Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.
Here was what was mistakenly released:
* Search data for roughly 612,000 anonymized users over a three month period from March to May....
Sorry, but we still have that sick feeling. That's 612,000 burned people. And now we're checking out Google's recent release of data too, with more details here.
Just another thanks to Adam D'Angelo, who was up at 2am when he first emailed us Sunday morning about all this, and then still up at 6am to answer questions. And AOL has taken the data down, all this in barely 24 hours on a slow weekend. Adam just graduated as undergrad and is taking some time off before grad school. What a way to take time off.
http://www.siliconbeat.com/cgi-bin/mt331/mt-tb.cgi/1843
Links to blogs that reference this entry:
AOL Research exposes data; we've got a little sick feeling
Excerpt: (AOL has responded, saying they screwed up, and have taken the data down. More at update here). Here are some excerpts from a post from Adam D'Angelo, over at CalTech, about AOL Research's efforts to engage with the research community. Does anyone else...
Tracked: August 7, 2006 9:00 AM
AOL Just Did the Unthinkable - Boycott AOL?
Excerpt:
(Updated)
Thank you, Google for resisting the DOJ's effort to obtain user search data. You put up a good fight to protect our privacy, and
Tracked: August 7, 2006 11:46 AM
Postbubble Podcast Episode 12 - Tuesday August 8th, 2006
Excerpt: Here is our podcast for Tuesday August 8th, 2006. Today we cover WordPress䴜s first Wordcamp, AOL䴜s apology for publicly releasing search data, Google and MySpace teaming up, and Yahoo䴜s unveiling of social search. For those of you that want a se...
Tracked: August 8, 2006 1:32 AM
How Valuable is the Leaked AOL Data to SEO?
Excerpt: When AOL Data Leak story hit the press, I was out in San Jose at the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Although I was reading about it, and there was a ton of buzz around this topic, I really didn䴜t get down into the nitty gritty of the story while ...
Tracked: August 12, 2006 8:47 PM
www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
if you do not wish to download the data - someone has created an online Search Service
Search Engine WEB ‰ú£ on August 8, 2006 1:37 AMComment link
Yes.. also, try out the random feature here to see the AOL log. Some of the search are very interesting. Hours of fun because of AOL screwed up.
http://data.aolsearchlogs.com/log/random.cgi
head on August 12, 2006 3:27 AMComment link
