p2pnet.net News:- Fall-out from AOL’s dreadful slip when it “accidentally” released details on well over half-a-million user searches continues.

“Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this,” said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein on the company’s, “innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools” which resulted in the release of the information.

No personally-identifiable data?

In direct contradiction, “We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry,” he also said, according to The New York Times.

This followed the successful NYT effort to actually ID someone, the person being a 62-year-old Georgia widow who, frequently researches her friends` medical ailments and loves her three dogs.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and as the Los Angeles Times says, AOL may have failed its customers, but it did the rest of us a favor by showing the kind of information that search sites collect.

Like AOL, spokesmen for Google and Yahoo say records are kept for ‘as long as it’s useful.’ In some cases, the information is associated with a specific individual – for example, a Yahoo or Google account holder. In other cases, it’s linked to an Internet address, which can be traced (with some effort) to a particular Internet access account.

The OpEd goes on:

The companies say they keep their logs private unless forced by a subpoena or court order to share the data with investigators or lawyers. That’s a start, but it would be far more comforting if they had clear data-retention policies limiting how long the information could be linked to individual accounts or Internet addresses. Those policies should also be public so market forces could help shape them. Web users who routinely reveal much about themselves to their credit-card companies and grocery stores may decide not to care about the issue.

“If they spent a few minutes reading the AOL search data, though, they might reach a different conclusion.

Also See:
no personally-identifiable data – AOL data release debacle, August 8, 2006
successful NYT effort – AOL user identified, August 9, 2006
Los Angeles Times – No Such Thing as a Free Search, August 10, 2006

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