AOL responds to data leak. They screwed up.
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John Battelle has gotten an early response from AOL about the data leak that we posted about early yesterday. Here’s the summary:
This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. 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.
Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.
Here was what was mistakenly released:
* Search data for roughly 612,000 anonymized users over a three month period from March to May….
Sorry, but we still have that sick feeling. That’s 612,000 burned people. And now we’re checking out Google’s recent release of data too, with more details here.
Just another thanks to Adam D’Angelo, who was up at 2am when he first emailed us Sunday morning about all this, and then still up at 6am to answer questions. And AOL has taken the data down, all this in barely 24 hours on a slow weekend. Adam just graduated as undergrad and is taking some time off before grad school. What a way to take time off.
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