AOL Subscribers Sue Over Release Of Search Data

An anonymous reader points out an AP story indicating that AOL hasn't seen the end of its own public embarrassment after airing some dirty laundry on behalf of its customers. Excerpted from the story: "Three AOL subscribers who suddenly found records of their Internet searches widely distributed online are suing the company under privacy laws and are seeking an end to its 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. ... Filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., the lawsuit seeks class-action status. It does not specify the amount of damages being sought."

Comments

With luck, this will accomplish two things:

[cunina]

1) Scaring other ISPs and related companies into better privacy safeguards

2) Hastening the timely demise of AOL

Re:With luck, this will accomplish two things:

[tymbow]

Even if they do win, it wont make any difference to data retention practices though. No one would ever rule against that because of potential use as evidence; especially with the push to mandated retention policies.

Re:With luck, this will accomplish two things:

[Das Modell]

I'm not intimately familiar with the search logs, but I've seen a little of them. How are the logs tied to personal information? Do they contain IP addresses, or what?

Oh...

[Greyfox]

Are there, in fact, Privacy Laws? I wasn't under the impression the US Government was particularly worked up about privacy. Certainly the EU seems to be taking a much more aggressive stance about having companies protect your data...

Besides these AOL users shouldn't get too worked up. They couldn't possibly be too concerned about what anyone thinks about them or they wouldn't be using AOL in the first place. The rest of the Internet wasn't particularly surprised at the contents of that search data -- we were all working under the assumption that everyone on AOL was searching for pictures of poo and instructions on how to murder people anyway. The data in question simply confirmed that suspicion.

Re:Wondering

[postmortem]

And how exactly you figure out your private data is available to whole world if not searching for it?

Re:Probably civilly actionable.

[Potor]

searching for farm sex does not necessarily mean "you like to conduct sexual relations with farm animals." it could mean any number of things, from a poorly formulated search term, to incredulity that such practices exist. the ambiguity of the dead letter is one of the reasons to oppose the sharing of such data.

Re:Wondering

[merreborn]

In all seriousness:

x - y - z = -1635

0 y 100
0 x 773
0 z 10000

There are only so many solutions to that problem...