AOL Members Suing AOL for Privacy Violations

Three AOL members have filed suit against AOL LLC, the internet division of Time Warner, the lawsuit, which was filed as C-06-5866, says AOL violated their privacy by posting their searches online. In a previous post I mentioned AOL Releasing the Searches From 650,000 Users , thats 20 million online searches, and lots of privacy lost. Users were easily found, and I’m sure many are hiding and hoping no one figures out they were the ones searching on how to kill my wife, or the many searches by pedophiles. I hope they make them do something, maybe it will getother search engines, like Google, thinking about the storing of user data, and maybe they will stop storing user searches as well. The suit seeks $5,000 per user whose data was exposed and a prohibition that would keep AOL from storing search data altogether.

The complaint states that on July 31, AOL posted on its publicly accessible website a database containing roughly 20 million Internet search queries entered over a three-month period by approximately 658,000 different AOL members. Plaintiffs claim the database detailed the date and time the AOL member conducted each search, as well as any websites the member clicked on after AOL’s search engine returned its results. No AOL user names were attached to the database, but the complaint says search terms contain personal information, enough to identify the AOL member. The Complaint alleges that although AOL later pulled the database from its website, the database had already been downloaded, reposted, and made searchable on other websites. Source: Yahoo Finance

If you are an AOL member and your search queries were posted online, without your consent, then you may wan to contact the lawyers about the case, here are their contact details:

C. Oliver Burt, III
Manuel John Dominguez, Esq.
Marc J. Greenspon, Esq.
222 Lakeview Avenue, Suite 900
West Palm Beach, FL 33401
(561) 835-9400
Lawfla@bermanesq.com

More Coverage from Good Morning Silicon Valley,

“As of the date of this complaint it is the understanding of plaintiffs and their counsel that AOL has not done anything to help the members whose personal sensitive and confidential records were released to the public by AOL,” the complaint alleges. “AOL members who sought assistance from AOL about the disclosure of the Member Search Data were not offered any assistance. AOL’s only response, if any, was to offer the victimized member a free month of AOL service, a service which AOL is now offering for free.”

A whole month of free service, how on earth could they turn that down? Especially considering they are giving it away to broadband users anyway.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Privacy No Comments » September 2006

If Only…

If only AOL searcher 4417749, Thelma Arnold, could’ve had access to some of these new “tools” coming out, she might not have been so easy to find. Lost in the Crowd hopes to give back the anonymity that has been lost to us as search engines like Google and AOL store more and more info about us. Found via Realtechnews.com.

Lost in the Crowd is a free service to help you search the web more anonymously. As you probably know, when you use a search engine what you search for is associated with a unique identifying “cookie” stored in your browser. Because what you search for tells a lot about who you are, this creates a number of privacy concerns. These concerns were directly illustrated by the recent release of user search data by AOL.

In the past, the only way to prevent this association was to routinely clear the cookies from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach: automatically and over time placing a number of random queries through the search engines you use from your actual tracking cookie. What searches did you care about versus those that were just made up? There’s no way for the search engine, or anyone else, to tell.

Clicking around the site it says they are running searches for 682 users, so they aren’t burning the world up yet, but people are using the site.

There is also a Firefox plugin that does the same thing, TrackMeNot. “Protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data.” Available here.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Google, Privacy, Search Engines No Comments » August 2006