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Three AOL subscribers have sued the Internet service provider in the US District Court for Northern California after their search data was made public by the company. In early August, AOL made all the wrong kinds of headlines by posting a complete, three-month set of search queries performed by over 650,000 of its users. The company realized that it made a mistake and quickly removed the data, but not before the entire database of queries was copied and made available elsewhere.
AOL had stripped the data queries of user names, replacing them instead with ID numbers. That was not enough to shield the identities of the users, with the New York Times identifying and tracking down the identity of searcher no. 4417749, a 62-year-old widow in Georgia.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out, especially as people were not easily identifiable. I bet theres some people's search data in there who would like to sue, if only they knew their data was included.
