AOL apologises for privacy 'screw up'

AOL released the internet search terms that more than 650,000 of its subscribers entered over a three-month period and admitted Monday that what it originally intended as a gesture to researchers amounted to a privacy breach and a mistake.

Although AOL had substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers' real user names, the company acknowledged the search queries themselves may contain personally identifiable data.

For example, many users type their names to find out whether sites have dirt on them and then separately search for online mentions of their phone, credit card or Social Security numbers. A few days later, they may search for pizzerias in their neighbourhoods, revealing their locations, or for prescription drug prices, revealing their medical conditions. All those separate searches would be linked to the same numeric ID.