AOL: Breach of Privacy Was a Mistake

AOL's home page is shown on a computer screen Friday, Aug. 4, 2006 in New York. AOL will shed as many as 5,000 employees, a quarter of its global work force, within six months as the company seeks more than $1 billion in savings to offset its decision to give more services away for free. That decision, analysts say, may not be enough to draw new visitors. Key to AOL's success will be how well it taps its strengths in video and instant messaging. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) (Mark Lennihan - AP)

"Old searches don't mean a lot to them and present a big risk to individuals," he said.

The AOL search data had been posted about 10 days ago but were not widely known outside the research community until Web journals began pointing to AOL's research site Sunday. AOL removed the file, but not before copies were already circulating on the Internet.

The data file included information on what search terms were used, when the search was conducted and whether the user clicked on any of the results.

One user, for instance, was repeatedly searching for information about divorcing someone whose husband is in the Army and about dating services in Oak Brook, Ill., while another kept searching for members of one family by name, along with a Chicago auto dealer and "naked Russian women."

All told, the file had information on 19 million queries from 658,086 subscribers from March 1 to May 31. The data only included searches conducted in the United States using AOL's proprietary software, which until last week was available only to paying subscribers. Searches made over the free AOL.com portal were not disclosed.

AOL's Weinstein said only 0.3 percent of all searches were released.

AOL, like other search engines, does make such data available to law-enforcement authorities with subpoenas. It complied with a Justice Department request for search queries as part of the Bush administration's effort to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography. AOL said it did so without compromising users' privacy.

Google, on the other hand, fought the subpoena, and a judge ultimately ruled that the company didn't have to turn over specific search requests.

A display in the lobby of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., continually scrolls some of the searches being conducted through its site. The data, however, can be viewed only by people physically at Google, and multiple searches by the same person are not linked.

"It doesn't really matter if someone is peeking at you," said Alex Halavais, a professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. "When the data starts to get tied together, it becomes much more invasive."

He said such data would be useful for researchers like him, "but if I were an AOL subscriber, I would be a little more than upset."