Features

New York Times, By KATIE HAFNER, August 23, 2006

When AOL researchers released three months� worth of users� query logs to a publicly accessible Web site late last month, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell, downloaded the data right away. But when a firestorm over privacy breaches erupted, he decided against using it.

"Now it's sitting there, in cold storage," said Professor Kleinberg, who works on algorithms for understanding the structure of the Web and searching it. "The number of things it reveals about individual people seems much too much. In general, you don't want to do research on tainted data."

After the data was released for academic researchers like Professor Kleinberg to work with, many were torn, loath to conduct research with it as they balanced a chronic thirst for useful data against concerns over individual privacy.

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Some see the data as too valuable to withhold altogether. "One of the biggest problems is trying to get real data," said Christopher Manning, an assistant professor of computer science and linguistics at Stanford University.

Although the 650,000 AOL users were not personally identified in the data, the logs contained enough information to discern an individual's identity in some cases.

AOL quickly withdrew the data from its research Web site, but not before it had been downloaded, reposted and made searchable at a number of Web sites. And on Monday, the company dismissed Abdur Chowdhury, the researcher who posted the data, along with another employee. Maureen Govern, AOL's chief technology officer, resigned.

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