Slashdot Mirror
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."
First they demote him from being a lt. commander. Then they attach him to AOL. Somewhere Lore must be pulling the strings.
Where were you when the voynix came?
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?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Almost everything a company does, especially publicly has to have multiple stamps of approval. Can't even order a pencil without paperwork. Right now AOL is headhunting for scapegoats to sacrifice to appease the masses. This had to have nearly everybody OKing it, if it was a mistake it would have gotten yanked back a LOT faster and legal actions would be pending, they aren't threatening anybody yet because they probably don't want their own records being pulled out and becoming massivly liable.
Not at all sure about why they thought it was a good idea, they must have thought the ID numbers were sufficient to conceal identities which also shows the lack of security knowledge most executives have.
who else would have the phenomenal insight to give us such gems as
l /8-21-06_21.gif
l /8-13-06_26.gif
l /8-21-06_9.gif
http://i.somethingawful.com//sasbi/2006/08/docevi
http://i.somethingawful.com//sasbi/2006/08/docevi
and of course
http://i.somethingawful.com//sasbi/2006/08/docevi
I bet they have a stamp that says that.
-Dave
>>> so correct me if I'm wrong
You're wrong.
The IP address or user name of the person who searched has been removed, but it was replaced with a unique identifier that tracked all of the searches by the same person.
Many people search for things related to themselves. For example, if you have looked for a job in the last four years, you were foolish if you didn't search for your own name to see if your friends' blogs had descriptions of your late-night drinking binges and drug use. (You are probably foolish if you used AOL search to do this, but that's a different discussion.)
CNN ran a story where they were able to track down one older lady, just because she searched for her last name, searched for "drugstores near " or somesuch, and was the only person in her area with that name. They confirmed with her that the searches were hers. (She has a dog with problems urinating on her carpet, and she has friends with lots of diseases that she "researches" for them.) They picked someone to track down who hadn't searched for anything "naughty", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have if they had wanted to.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'd say this only proves the point - this information wanted to be free badly enough to escape from AOL, leaving a trail of career destruction in its wake!
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 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?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."