AOL apologizes for release of user search data AOL apologized on Monday for releasing search log data on subscribers that had been intended for use with the company's newly launched research site. http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6102793.html?tag=nefd.top On Mon, 7 Aug 2006 11:02:26 -0400, Alex Halavais wrote
What an extraordinarily tempting piece of research data. And so, the ethical question comes quickly to the fore:
Clearly, no Institutional Review Board would ever allow such a collection. Users had a reasonable expectation that their searches would not be recorded and openly distributed. (See, for example, the user looking to kill his wife: http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/aol-search-data-shows- users-planning-to-commit-murder/ . ) Moreover, the ability to link searches of a given user makes this a potentially very revealing data set. I don't think that the anonymization of user names is enough to make this usable.
And yet, there it is. It's already out there, and as I said, very tempting. Is it ethical to make use of this already-collected data if your use substantially masks the private matters of these users. Any use I would make of the data would make it extremely unlikely that any private information would be revealed--though the mere existence of the public data set in some ways makes this moot.
The obvious parallel (Godwin's law notwithstanding) is the controversy over using Nazi experimental data in medical research. But it seems to me that there are some shades of grey here. AOL Search is not a Nazi concentration camp, and it is worth noting that an article based on the data has already appeared in peer-reviewed conference proceedings. While I think that the distribution of their search data without the clear permission of its users, either to the public or to the government, is pretty clearly unethical, I don't know that it makes this data poison fruit. Tainted, yes, poison, I don't think so.
Finally, I wonder what AOL's move is now. They've pulled the plug on the page, but lots of people presumably have and will share the data. If AOL now revokes permission to use the data, what does that mean? Do they own the data at this point? Providing and then pulling back data would set a terrible precedent.
(Blogged at http://alex.halavais.net/aol-data/ )
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