2sonsandadaughter

AOL on Aug. 7 blamed an internal "screw-up" for the embarrassing release of detailed keyword search data for roughly 658,000 anonymized users.

Dulles, Va.-based AOL's mea culpa comes in the midst of a firestorm of criticism from privacy advocates that the information—which amounts to about 20 million search queries—could be traced back to AOL users.

Already struggling to repair its image with users, the data spillage is another black eye for the Internet division of Time Warner.

2sonsandadaughter

The data, which has been mirrored on multiple Web sites, represented a random selection of searches conducted over a three-month period (March to May 2006) and includes a numbered User ID, the actual query, the time of the search and the destination domain visited.

The AOL usernames were changed to random strings, but the data associated with each search is matched to the number.

In some cases, there is a theoretical possibility that the search queries could be used to personally identify an AOL user.

kitkat86

I bet any hacker worth his money could come up with a program to convert the data to the users' names.

Desiree

I dont get it So another words they have peoples AOL names and passwords out there on a search or what?