AOL Technology Chief Resigns Over Privacy Breach
    The Assocatied Press

    Monday 21 August 2006

    New York - Two AOL employees were fired and its chief technology officer has left the company following a privacy breach in which the Internet search terms of more than 650,000 subscribers were publicly released.

    Maureen Govern, the technology chief, will be replaced on an interim basis by John McKinley, who had held that position before becoming AOL's president for digital services. The change takes effect immediately, according to a memo AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller sent to employees on Aug. 21.

    The researcher who released the data and that employee's direct supervisor were fired, said one person familiar with the company's decisions. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because release of personnel information was not authorized, would not say whether Govern's departure was voluntary.

    AOL admitted earlier this month that it had made a mistake in releasing three months' worth of search terms. Although AOL had substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers' real user names, the company acknowledged the search queries themselves may contain personally identifiable data.

    Last week, a privacy rights group filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging the breach was intentional.

    AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein denied the allegation made by the World Privacy Forum, reiterating earlier descriptions of the breakdown as a "mistaken release" by a bumbling researcher.

    The San Diego-based World Privacy Forum's filing on Aug. 16 follows a similar complaint by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

    Both groups are urging the FTC to investigate and possibly penalize AOL for its unauthorized release of about 19 million search requests made by about 658,000 subscribers during a three-month period ending in May.

    The files containing the search requests were publicly accessible for 10 days before AOL removed the information, giving people time to fetch copies that continue to circulate on Web sites like http://www.aolstalker.com.

    The FTC complaints allege AOL - owned by Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) Inc. - engaged in unfair or deceptive business practices by exposing its subscribers' information, which included requests for online pornography, murder tips and medical advice.

    Although no names were attached to the search requests, some of the data was revealing enough to figure out the identities of the people behind the queries.

    The FTC hasn't indicated whether it intends to investigate AOL.