OPEN

The Guardian reports that AOL has fired its CTO and two other people over the release of data about how customers used its search engine.

The data itself did not technically breach any privacy laws as it did not reveal the identity of the users themselves. Instead, they were referred to by unique user numbers. But the data did reveal details of what was being searched for, which could be used to work out who was doing the searching. The search data itself was full of personal information about other people.

Heads certainly should roll for this kind of betrayal of customer privacy. As the internet becomes intertwined with our lives search engines and other online services become more and more intimate reflections of our lives.

This isn’t just a case of an embarrassed senior citizen being identified by her search behaviour in the New York Times, this data is extremely valuable. As the CEO of my company says on our blog, it’s a rare insight into the workings of Google and search behaviour that people outside of the search engines rarely get to see. That was the intention – to be useful.

But, as the Guardian article points out, it is also extremely useful information to spammers, fraudsters and “black hat” search engine optimisers (people who use unethical methods to boost their or their clients’ search rankings).

There is an unwritten contract between the user and the search engines, based on trust. AOL will suffer much more than just some bad press over this – I wonder how many of its customers have hesitated over using its search function since this scandal. It’s a brand in trouble already and this kind of incompetency does it no favours.