September 26, 2006 Comments
Danny Sullivan has an excellent blog post today that talks about the latest problems to plague AOL after they released member search records to the public last month. The class action suit has been filed on behalf of the 658,000 individuals whose search term history was included in the report and asks for anywhere from $1000 - $4000 in damages per person.
From Danny's post:
It will be interesting to see if the court case ultimately finds that everyone should receive payment, given the potential harm they suffered, or if it will only pay to those who prove in some way they actually were personally identifiable or had personal information released in some way because of AOL's actions. Perhaps there will be a compromise between the two, if the case succeeds.
Aside from cash payouts, the case also wants AOL to enforce a license prohibiting commercial and non-research user of the data, plus wants the material removed from internet search engines (which means, really, getting it off the internet itself). It also seeks to prevent AOL from storing any type of web search data and to destroy any already in its possession.
As Danny points out, it will be interesting to see how the case moves forward. While it's true that some searchers CAN be identified by their queries...(for instance The New York Times was able to use those search records to personally identify one AOL user in an article last month) the reality is that a great deal of those searchers probably couldn't be matched up with their histories.
The full text of the lawsuit is available online.
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