When Sharing is Bad!

AOL released search query data of 500,000 customers from March to May 2006 without customers’ consent. The purpose was to provide this real data to the Information Retrieval research community for examination and discovery purposes. Screen id were not released and replaced by a unique id. As you can imagine, so many people objected to this and considered it a breach of privacy forcing AOL to unexposed the data file, which they did. Get more info at digg where 2,512 pepole so far responded to this story. However, some believe that the data currently is in the hands of about 1,000 people. This means that the data can not be re-claimed and will be further disseminated. This is the magical power of the web!