AOL sued for search privacy violations

by Brian Turner

AOL is being served with a class action lawsuit in America, after the company released user data online that allowed users of the AOL search engine to be traced.

It’s the first legal action to arise from AOL’s disastrous – and completely voluntary – disclosure of user search data, and may yet be followed with more.

Although AOL has sacked staff behind the data release and also apologised, the scale of the data release may yet see more lawsuits proceeding from it.

Overall, the issue of how easy it can be to identify human users simply by the search queries performed, has lead to a peaked interest in data retention and use by ISPs, and the potential privacy violations resulting from it.

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Posted in: Security