AOL Releases CTO and Two Others for Data Leak

The fallout is starting at AOL for the release of search data of 650,000 users, with AOL releasing it’s CTO and two others. They’ve apologized and gotten the attention of capitol hill, now it’s all over but the firing.

Maureen Govern, who joined AOL as CTO last September, will leave the company immediately along with two other employees who thought publishing the details of 19 million Web searches performed by 600,000 users to the Web was a grand idea. Source: SiliconValley.com

From Techcrunch,

From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers. Hopefully these firings are tied to the actual people responsible and not just for the sake of holding someone, anyone, responsible.

So, this makes it sound like it was part of some plan, and not just one clueless guys mistake. So, I wonder which it really is?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels August 2006

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