Execs at AOL Approved Release of Private Data?

reporter writes "The New York Times has published a report providing further details about the release of private AOL search queries to the public. According to the report: 'Dr. Jensen, who said he had worked closely with Mr. Chowdhury on projects for AOL's search team, also said he had been told that the posting of the data had been approved by all appropriate executives at AOL, including Ms. [Maureen] Govern.' The report also identifies the other two people whom AOL management fired: they are Abdur Chowdhury and his immediate supervisor. Chowdhury is the employee who did the actual public distribution of the private search queries. He, apparently, has retained a lawyer."

Comments

retained a lawyer?

[Quasar1999]

At this point, why would you want to stay at your present job if you need a lawyer to keep it... even if you are successful, why would you want to stay, it's obvious you won't be liked by management, since they're trying to get rid of you... Or am I missing something?

Re:retained a lawyer?

[mrchaotica]

Perhaps because being fired is a whole lot worse than quitting voluntarily... and more importantly, lets them avoid giving you the severance pay they would otherwise owe.

Personally, I know that if I were told by my boss to do something and then got fired for doing it, I'd be extremely pissed!

Re:retained a lawyer?

[Daniel_Staal]

The main point really is that he believes he was fired because he is being blamed for something that is not his fault: He did what he was told, and what he was told was authorized by his bosses and the appropriate people. Blaming the mailclerk for the mail isn't good policy. (He's a little more involved then a mailclerk I assume, but how much I don't know.)

Then, if he doesn't want to work there, he can quit. There is a huge difference in being able to tell a prospective employeer that you quit because of the culture of blame-passing, and having to tell them you were fired because you released private data to the public.

Re:retained a lawyer?

[szembek]

Maybe it's not about getting fired. Maybe he's afraid of lawsuits coming his way if he is primarily blamed for authorizing the release of data.

Re:retained a lawyer?

[TheGreek]

At this point, why would you want to stay at your present job if you need a lawyer to keep it

Ask former President Clinton.

If I'm getting harassed at my current job, not only is it actionable, but chances are I can get another job elsewhere in the same line of work.

When you're President of the United States, you don't really have any recourse when Congress (a co-equal branch) starts issuing subpoenas, nor are similar jobs readily available.

Nice bad analogy, though.

Re:retained a lawyer?

[Captain Hook]

Which is where compensation comes in, if there is a reasonable chance he won't be able to work again then AOL should have to pay for ruining the guys career.

That of course, is assuming that he really is as innocent in all of this as he claims to be.

Re:retained a lawyer?

[clickclickdrone]

>It's the CV
I know of one senior guy who worked for a well known credit card company. He was brought in to cut costs. On day one all the department heads were brought in one by one. He ignored everyone's plans and spreadsheets and just gave them a slip of paper with 500k, 1 million or whatever written on it and said 'that's your budget'. A few months later he had another 35m to lose and noticed a single dept that cost that. He ordered it shut down and the staff made redundant. Within a few months the company's income was in freefall - he'd sacked their most profitable sales team. He had to go grovelling to the board to explain, rehire as many as he could at inflated salaries and was then fired. You can bet his CV reads 'Worked for xxxxx, achieved 70 million cost cuts'

Re:retained a lawyer?

[EndlessNameless]

The Nuremberg Defense didn't work at the Nuremberg Trials because the people involved did things that any sane person knows is terribly "wrong" according to just about every existing belief system.

Of course, don't let that small difference in scale dissuade you from bringing Godwin's Law into effect.

AOL did not provide any of the information necessary to identify the searchers. So while I disagree with the disclosure, this breach of privacy is on par with other acts of corporate idiocy I've seen, and based on that I would say that there wasn't any basis requiring him to refuse this order. There's no clear and compelling need to disobey an approved transfer of more-or-less anonymous data, unlike a situation where someone is ordered to kill innocent civilians by the truckful.

Finally, get a sense of proportion. Are you seriously comparing a poor privacy decision with a decision on a life-and-death matter? Tenuously exaggerated examples do not shore up tenuously supported arguments.

Re:retained a lawyer?

[TheGreek]

Perhaps someone should tell bush that congress is a coequal branch of government.

It might be more effective for somebody to tell Congress that Congress is a co-equal branch.

Each branch only has as much power as it chooses to exercise.

Re:Possible Solution

[trevor-ds]

That's a bit cynical, don't you think?

If they really wanted to make the most money possible, they would have sold these logs (non-anonymized) to the scores of direct marketers that I'm sure would love to have this data. Instead, they packaged it up and tried to make it available to academic researchers. These researchers honestly just want to make better search engines that run faster and return better results. Furthermore, when academics come up with a great new idea, it gets published so that anyone can read it.

Every once in a while, someone suggests an open source search engine. Check out Nutch if you want to see work in this area. However, if open source search solutions are going to be any good at all, they'll have to rely on the decades of public, published information retrieval research that's already out there.

We are entering a time when companies are capable of totally outpacing academia because they have query log data, so they know exactly what users actually do. There is no way that an academic can get this kind of data unless a company releases it. Researchers at AOL, in good faith, tried to release data so researchers could have a chance at success. Ultimately, of course, that's good for AOL since they're not in the top three search engines out there. Public research can only help raise AOL's standing by helping to level the playing field. But, it's good for you too, because you can build your open source solution based on this research too.

Yes, the release was botched, and yes, the long term user identifiers were a mistake. But don't make AOL out to be some evil company that was only out to destroy your privacy. They made a mistake!

The Real Problem

[Nom du Keyboard]

The real problem isn't that they let this data escape.

The real problem is that they shouldn't have been keeping it in the first place!

If it can harm a consumer by its release, then it can harm that same consumer by the fact that the have it in their possession in the first place. Just how is AOL that much better or more trustworthy than the world at large?