AOL sued in search data scandal
2pnet.net News:- Three AOL subscribers whose search data ended up online are looking for class action status, as well as an end to AOL’s retention of search-related data.
“The lawsuit is believed to be the first in the wake of AOL’s intentional release of some 19 million search requests made over a three-month period by more than 650,000 subscribers, including the three plaintiffs – two unnamed Californians and Kasadore Ramkissoon of Richmond County, N.Y,” says The Washington Post.
At first AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein stated, “Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this,” he was later quoted as saying, “We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry.”
And, “Although AOL had substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers’ real user names, the company acknowledged the search queries themselves may contain personally identifiable data, revealing names, credit card numbers and medical conditions,” says the Post’s story.
In a practice common to all search engines, AOL currently keeps data linked to specific subscribers for up to 30 days and other data, such as the search records released, for longer, it adds.
The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and World Privacy Forum already have filed complaints with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).
Also See:
The Washington Post – 3 AOL Subscribers Sue Over Data Release, September 25, 2006
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September 27th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Dear Editorial team,
Privacy concerns are becoming a major social and legal issue these days.
Search engines play an important role in the whole equation.
The recent AOL Privacy Breach is just one example of what can happen if search engine user data are being stored.
The whole AOL debacle could have been prevented.
Meta-search engine Ixquick.com’s has the only simple solution: “Data not stored can’t be breached”.
We are the first search engine to stop recording any privacy details of our users.
Some background information:
-Ixquick is a meta search engine , developed in 1998 in NY.
-It offers a simultaneous search in up to 12 of the best search engines.
-Ixquick will not share IP addresses with these individual search engines while searching.
-Ixquick will delete the IP addresses of the users within 48 hrs.
In fact we have a program running which opens the log files, deletes the user related IP addresses and overwrites the “old” logfile. Also we took away the unique ID out of our
Cookies, the Cookie is only used for remembering the settings on the user’s PC. We even overwrite the “old” Cookie if a user has one on his PC from before this privacy initiative.
Conclusion:
Ixquick.com offers its users a high quality web search without storing any privacy data.
Our initiative is being met with overwhelmingly positive response.
You can read more about Ixquick’s Privacy initiative in our press release:http://eu.ixquick.com/eng/press/pr_big_brother.html
Please contact us if you would like additional information.
Sincerely,
Robert Beens
CEO Ixquick.com
May 24th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
There are many stories on the Internet about the class action lawsuit filed against AOL by Berman DeValerio and others because of its release of the search history data. But as of today, May 24, 2007,I have been unable to find anything on the settlement or jury verdict in this case,
No C-06-5866.
My name and book name are in the 2006 AOL search engine data
and spammers have used my name and book name in many spam links on the search
engines, including putting my name and book name in spam porno links. bernardpyron@gmail.com