AOL managed to hit the news big today. Two new juicy topics for your Monday morning.
First up, AOL denies your right to cancel AOL, even if you’re dead! Thats right, the daughter of a deceased man fought for 9 months to get his AOL account canceled. It was only canceled after someone from Tech Talk column of the St Louis Post-Dispatch contacted AOL on her behalf.
Second up… AOL has also released massive amounts of private data. The data is mirrored on about 5 sites still, AOL has taken down the official page.
This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.
The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged.The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other types of search research.
This was a really bad idea, AOL. Since you grouped the searches by user, it could be very easy for the supposed ‘anonymity’ of the data to fall apart. The fact that you’ve taken it down indicates that you’ve figured this out.
To add more to their worries, the mirror allowed many to download, I even heard it was posted on thepiratebay.org, but the link to the torrent was invalid when I listed it so I’m assuming it was taken down rather quickly.
Also rumored on the slashdot thread is the fact that some people are apparently stupid enough to search for their own social security number as well as names and addresses. Because it is grouped by user, it probably isn’t hard to figure out who someone is or even steal their identity.
At this point, who knows how many copies of this are floating around in the wrong hands.
A site where you can search the data is here:
http://www.datablunder.com/logitems/query/
Its also available here:
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
My sister works for a bank – hence me not giving my name – and she fights with AOL on charge backs all the time. She has resorted to suggesting that the bank customer cancel their debit or credit card and have one re-issued….sad!
It floors me the steps a company will take away from customer service. They can not employ the Microsoft strategy of momentum….they just arent that big and the competition is huge.
Dominic
http://www.businessatwar.com
Nobody: But like in the article… the lady tried to stop payment on the AOL charges and they required a letter from AOL to do so. I guess cancelling it is the same, just make sure that your credit card company isn’t one that reactivates your card when you try and charge something to it.
A *quick* site where you can search the AOL Logs for yourself, is here:
http://www.frogspy.com