AOL Admits To Search Data 'Screw Up'

After the potentially personally identifying search logs of over 650,000 AOL users were published by AOL Research this weekend, AOL issued an apology and a vow to investigate the matter.

The blogosphere lit up with concerns of privacy violations, calls for boycotts, mentions of class-action lawsuits all while e-marketers rejoiced over the “gold mine” of information revealed in the release. AOL called the release “a mistake.”

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told murdok. “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.”

A 2 Gb (when uncompressed) download of the data was made available for academic purposes, asking researchers to reference the publication when using the information. User screen names were “anonymized,” or replaced with a unique user ID number.

But many quickly pointed out that the numbers allowed analysis of the search queries in which searcher information could be deduced. The data contained evidence of ego searches, social security numbers and addresses. AOL maintains though, that there was no identifying information in the data.

“Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this,” said Weinstein. “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.”

Weinstein confirmed the following details of what was mistakenly released:

Search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users over a three month period from March to May.

There was no personally identifiable data provided by AOL with those records, but search queries themselves can sometimes include such information.

According to comScore Media Metrix, the AOL search network had 42.7 million unique visitors in May, so the total data set covered roughly 1.5% of May search users.

Roughly 20 million search records over that period, so the data included roughly 1/3 of one percent of the total searches conducted through the AOL network over that period.

The searches included as part of this data only included U.S. searches conducted within the AOL client software.

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