AOL May Face Federal Probe For Data Leak

Time Warner’s America On Line (AOL) has landed in more trouble for releasing search data of its subscribers to a third party. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit watchdog organization has reported the site to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and demanded a probe to investigate AOL and its operations. The EEF has complained that AOL has leaked out data including 20 million search terms from 658,000 AOL users, some of which could be traced directly to individuals. The EFF found searches from 106 users which seem to contain Social Security numbers and 4,000 searches which included street addresses. Although AOL has publicly apologized for what they called a “screw up”, and took the data off their site within 48 hours of being found out, the site has been severely criticized for infringing on the privacy of millions of its users and exposing them to a potential security threat. Read more here.