It was assumed around the office, well, pretty much everywhere, that after AOL’s Data Valdez, heads were going to roll at the company. According to the Wall Street Journal, they have officially rolled – three of them.
In addition, a researcher and a manager overseeing the research were also let go, but without the embarrassment heaped on their higher-up CTO. They were unnamed in the article.
AOL Research posted the data in question weeks ago, with the stated intention of aiding the branches of academia that study searcher behavior. Once the rest of the Internet discovered it, some time after it’s posting, the situation went severely pear-shaped.
Almost immediately, mirror sites popped up allowing anybody to search through the data, in which user names were replaced with unique ID numbers. It took the New York Times less than a week to connect the search queries enough to identify an AOL user.
The situation has been one of massive embarrassment for the company, reigniting debate on how much data and how long search engine companies can store personally identifying user information.
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