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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?
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.
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!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
- Sacked for gross incompetence
- Left after being used as a scapegoat
The point of most unfair dismissal actions is not the money, it's the CV.init 11 - for when you need that edge.
who else would have the phenomenal insight to give us such gems as
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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
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.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I bet they have a stamp that says that.
-Dave
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.
nothing
>>> 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.
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.
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!
That's when documenting your work is important. As a lead tester at Atari a few years ago, I was in situations that I could've been fired for except all my documentation pointed back to management. When a new boss told me to stop doing that, I told him I would not. Then it became a cat-and-mouse game for the next six months as he tried to get me fired without getting himself fired in the process. I eventually left on my own for "personal reasons" and it turned out I was the third person out of a dozen senior testers to leave that year when my boss became the department manager.
>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'
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
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!
"AOL did not provide any of the information necessary to identify the searchers."
l .html?ex=1156392000&en=4908a895fec7a6a7&ei=5070
Oh, really? A couple of NY Times reporters didn't let that stop them. They used the search data to find and interview User No. 4417749, Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga. Link to story below. Bugmenot login works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09ao
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.