By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG
August 23, 2006 5:37 p.m.; Page A2
Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit, responding to a recent furor over its release of
Web-search data on 658,000 of its subscribers, accepted its chief technology
officer's resignation and fired two other employees responsible for the breach.
Maureen Govern, whom the online service provider hired as its technology chief
in September, will leave the company immediately. An internal memorandum to
staff said she had chosen to depart. Ms. Govern couldn't be reached to comment.
THE DEBATE OVER DATA
• Reply All: Should web-search data be stored?
Before joining AOL last year, Ms. Govern, a Stanford graduate who began her
career at Bell Laboratories in 1978, was chief technology officer at Convergys
Corp., a billing and human-resources services company. She has also worked at
Motorola Inc.
Ms. Govern oversaw the AOL division responsible for the data release. In
addition to her, the researcher who released the data and a manager overseeing
the search-data project are leaving. John McKinley, president of AOL's digital
services division, will take over Ms. Govern's job on an interim basis.
The departures follow weeks of negative publicity in connection with the
disclosure, which AOL said was a mistake. The data release reignited a debate
about Internet privacy and whether search companies should be required to keep
private the data they collect. Last week, the World Privacy Forum, a
privacy-rights group, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties
organization, filed separate complaints with the Federal Trade Commission,
calling for a formal investigation of the incident.
The uproar comes at a difficult time for AOL, which has been hemorrhaging one
million subscribers a quarter as its users trade the narrowband access it offers
for high-speed Internet service from other providers. AOL reported 17.7 million
subscribers as of June 30. The migration forced AOL this month to abandon its
subscriber model. The company plans to offer nearly all of its services free to
users with a high-speed Internet connection and rely on advertising. For the new
strategy to work, however, AOL has to secure its subscribers' loyalty as they
shift to broadband, a task made more difficult by the search-data scandal.
In an email message to employees yesterday, AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller
attributed the data breach to poor judgment by some AOL staffers. "We are taking
a number of additional steps, on top of our existing security systems, to help
ensure this type of incident never happens again," Mr. Miller said in the email.
Mr. Miller said management had devised a "four-part plan" to buttress the
company's privacy policy. The plan includes the creation of a task force to look
at how long AOL should retain search data. The company also plans tighter
restrictions on employee access to the data.
AOL researchers posted the information, which detailed more than 20 million
queries from 658,000 of its users between March 1 and May 31, to a new AOL
research Web site last month. The document was intended for use by other
search-technology researchers but was noticed by bloggers in the
search-marketing field. Their discovery set off a flurry of blog postings and
led to hundreds of downloads of the data. AOL said it pulled the data off its
site after it realized what had happened.
AOL users were identified by anonymous user-ID numbers rather than by name.
However, the searchers' identities in many cases could be gleaned when personal
information such as addresses or interests was included in searches. In some
cases, people searched for their own names, and that information was included in
the data.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115618361010241207-search.html?KEYWORDS=AOL&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month
