AOL does it again with leaked search engine queries. No rest of the unfortunate I suppose…

AOL fessed up to leaking hundreds of thousands of search queries yesterday. But it was all a big mistake.

Spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told internetnews.com that the company posted the queries on July 31 on the publicly accessible research.aol.com.

Weinstein said AOL removed the queries, as soon as it discovered them, on Sunday evening.

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” Weinstein said.

“It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.”

According to Weinstein, AOL mistakenly released search data for roughly 658,000 users over a three-month period from March to May.

AOL did not provide personally identifiable data, but it said search queries themselves can sometimes include such information…. Source: InternetNews.com