AOL gets sued by three of its subscribers over leakage of search history
September 26th, 2006 Leave a comment Visited 62 times, 4 so far today
AOL gets sued by three of its subscribers over leakage of search history
Three AOL subscribers are suing the internet service provider AOL after the company managed to accidentally leak the internet search data of thousands of their subscribers.
They are suing the company under privacy laws and are seeking an end to its retention of search-related data.
AOL accidentally released some 19 million search requests made over a three-month period by more than 650,000 subscribers on one of their research websites, which resulted in a massive PR mess for them. The company later apologized for this mistake and removed the data from the servers.
The people behind this lawsuit seeking class-action status for this case but they have not specified details on how much damages they are asking for.
John Dominguez, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit said in a statement: “People paid AOL with the belief that their privacy was going to be protected. That’s not what happened.”
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September 27th, 2006 at 1:56 am
Dear Techwack editorial team,
With interest I read your article *AOL gets sued…â€
Privacy concerns are becoming a major social and legal issue these days.
Search engines play an important role in the whole equation.
The recent AOL Privacy Breach is just one example of what can happen if search engine user data are being stored.
Meta-search engine Ixquick.com’s has a simple solution to what the class action lawsuit would be all about: no longer storing data. The simple solution: “Data not stored can’t be breached”.
We are the first search engine to stop recording any privacy details of our users.
Some background information:
-Ixquick is a meta search engine , developed in 1998 in NY.
-It offers a simultaneous search in up to 12 of the best search engines.
-Ixquick will not share IP addresses with these individual search engines while searching.
-Ixquick will delete the IP addresses of the users within 48 hrs.
In fact we have a program running which opens the log files, deletes the user related IP
addresses and overwrites the “old” logfile. Also we took away the unique ID out of our
Cookies, the Cookie is only used for remembering the settings on the user’s PC. We even
overwrite the “old” Cookie if a user has one on his PC from before this privacy initiative.
Conclusion:
Ixquick.com offers its users a high quality web search without storing any privacy data.
Our initiative is being met with overwhelmingly positive response.
You can read more about Ixquick’s Privacy initiative in the attached press release.
Please contact us if you would like additional information.
Sincerely,
Robert Beens
CEO Ixquick.com
______________________________________________________________________
First search engine to stop recording privacy details
Ixquick.com eliminates ‘Big Brother’
As personal privacy concerns create growing alarm about the freedom of the Internet, the Ixquick metasearch engine (www.ixquick.com) has taken a pioneering step: starting today, Ixquick will permanently delete all personal search details gleaned from its users from the log files.
“This new feature of our search engine ensures both optimal privacy protection and maximum search performance for our customers, since they will be able to search using up to 12 of the best search engines without their personal data being recorded,” says Ixquick spokesman Alex van Eesteren.
As digital technology increasingly pervades our world, more and more personal details are being stored electronically, many of them by search engines. While you are searching the internet, these engines register the time of your searches, the terms you used, the sites you visited and your IP address. In many cases this IP address makes it possible to trace the computer, and in turn the household, that carried out the search.
These personal details are often retained for long periods by search engines and are of interest to commercial parties, governments and even criminals.
“Many search engines openly use this data for commercial purposes. It seems only to be a question of time before the data gets misused,” alleges Van Eesteren. “Therefore we have decided to permanently delete all personal search records. If the data is not stored, users privacy can’t be breached”.
Ixquick’s Meta Search feature enables the user to simultaneously search in up to 12 of the best search engines. However, Ixquick does not share the user’s personal data with these individual search engines in any circumstances. In addition, as of this week, Ixquick will delete the users’ IP addresses and ‘unique user IDs’ from its own ‘Log Files’.
“Therefore, any user can use Ixquick.com to search in a combination of the best search engines secure in the knowledge that they can enjoy complete protection of their privacy,” continues Mr. van Eesteren.
For more information, please visit http://www.ixquick.com
About Ixquick.com
Ixquick is a global, award-winning meta-search engine developed in New York, combining up to 12 search engines for each query, resulting in more relevant hits.