AOL offers CTO as burnt sacrifice for privacy blunder

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 22 August 2006 10:23

Your IT - Home IT

US internet company America Online has fired its relatively recently appointed chief technology officer and two other staff as a result of the most embarrassing public blunder in the company's history, which saw the privacy of 658,000 AOL customers compromised.

After an internal investigation of the events which led to 20 million searches of customers being published openly on the web, the AOL board decided that the buck stopped with CTO Maureen Govern, who has held the position for less than one year.

Govern, along with two other members of the division responsible for overseeing the search data of users, have been sacificed as part of the company's efforts to appease calls for blood from customers and privacy advocates in response to the incident.

The search data of customers was copied and circulated around the net before AOL realised and corrected its mistake. Although the data was supposedly anonymous, each search was given a unique user number which enables the searches of individual users to be clumped to together. In some and perhaps many instances, individuals could be identified by their search data and a profile built up based on the searches they made.

AOL has a small but significant share of the US online search market of about 6%. However, the unintentional privacy breach has raised the hackles of privacy advocates and users globally and the fallout has reached larger search players including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

All of the major search players keep similar data of each search made by customers in order to more effectively target advertising to individuals. Privacy advocates are growing increasingly nervous about potentially sensitive data being held by corporations about individuals who are under the impression that their searches are anonymous.

The corporations themselves realize that their livelihoods depend on the guarantee of privacy that they provide to their users. Earlier this year, Google successfully defended a subpoena from the Department of Justice to turn over its search records. However, in countries with less strict controls over privacy, search companies may be forced to hand over customer data in order to comply with local laws.

AOL is on the hunt for a new CTO, while former CTO John McKinley is temporarily acting in the position. From the look of things, being a CTO in a high profile internet search company can be a pretty precarious position.