Mike Arrington on TechCrunch reports this evening of an enormous AOL screwup, releasing information about 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users. The web query data in many cases reveals enough information about people to be able to figure out the name and personal information related to the users, despite the fact that their actual names are replaced in the data by a random ID number. The information was originally posted on an AOL Research site.

In many ways this is far more damaging than the standard name/address/credit card number data breach we’re now all used to; this rich data set could expose far more personal and confidential information. There is real value – and privacy issues – imbedded in the dozens of web searches we each do every day, something that AttentionTrust.org has been saying for quite a while now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 9:11 pm and is filed under AOL, ID Theft Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.