AOL Sees Three Senior Staff Leave After Privacy Breach
AOL Sees Three Senior Staff Leave After Privacy Breach…
August 23, 2006: …following a major online leak of search terms used by 650,000 America OnLine subscribers, and in just the time it takes to negotiate a golden handshake and lock down the non-disclosure agreement.
AOL has parted company with its Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Maureen Govern, in the fallout from the recent disclosure online of 650,000 user searches. It has also been reported that both the researcher and their supervisor were sacked.
The company is already in the process of setting up a 'task force' to examine how something so apparently simple as a research file could be viewed by the general populace could have been achieved.
This task force will, presumably, include the team of AOL staffers currently contacting those of its members whose social security numbers made up some of the data released into the wild. Whether the army of lawyers who will be briefed to deal with the complaint brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding the release.
To give some idea of the scale of the breach, the data leak entailed 20 million searches from about 658,000 users over a three-month period. These records, although not containing usernames did contain user IDs and, in some cases, enough information within the search terms to identify users in a 2Gb file.
AOL's initial response, as quoted on TechWeb also succinctly summed up the feelings of many of its users: ""This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," said AOL staffer, Andrew Weinstein. "It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."
In a totally unrelated story, the grandparents of 'Spam King', Davis Wolfgang Hawke have given AOL permission search their house for gold.