[Air-l] AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users

[Alex Halavais]

What an extraordinarily tempting piece of research data. And so, the
ethical question comes quickly to the fore:

Clearly, no Institutional Review Board would ever allow such a
collection. Users had a reasonable expectation that their searches
would not be recorded and openly distributed. (See, for example, the
user looking to kill his wife:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/aol-search-data-shows-users-planning-to-commit-murder/
. ) Moreover, the ability to link searches of a given user makes this
a potentially very revealing data set. I don't think that the
anonymization of user names is enough to make this usable.

And yet, there it is. It's already out there, and as I said, very
tempting. Is it ethical to make use of this already-collected data if
your use substantially masks the private matters of these users. Any
use I would make of the data would make it extremely unlikely that any
private information would be revealed--though the mere existence of
the public data set in some ways makes this moot.

The obvious parallel (Godwin's law notwithstanding) is the controversy
over using Nazi experimental data in medical research. But it seems to
me that there are some shades of grey here. AOL Search is not a Nazi
concentration camp, and it is worth noting that an article based on
the data has already appeared in peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
While I think that the distribution of their search data without the
clear permission of its users, either to the public or to the
government, is pretty clearly unethical, I don't know that it makes
this data poison fruit. Tainted, yes, poison, I don't think so.

Finally, I wonder what AOL's move is now. They've pulled the plug on
the page, but lots of people presumably have and will share the data.
If AOL now revokes permission to use the data, what does that mean? Do
they own the data at this point? Providing and then pulling back data
would set a terrible precedent.

(Blogged at http://alex.halavais.net/aol-data/ )



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// Alexander C. Halavais
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