IndustryAOL Fires CTO & Two Employees After Search Records Slip Up

AOL Fires CTO & Two Employees After Search Records Slip Up

The Wall Street Journal just reported that AOL has fired the Chief Technology Officer, Maureen Govern, and two other employees after releasing search records last week. The article named “AOL Fires Technology Chief After Web-Search Data Scandal” discloses that Maureen Govern, the CTO along with the researcher who released the data and the manager overseeing the research have been all fired. I am kind of surprised that AOL hit someone so high to the top, but it does make a statement, a statement AOL must make.

Postscript From Danny: News.com has a nice follow-up here, Three workers depart AOL after privacy uproar, and Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay highlights a Mercury News article where AOL’s statement of keeping data “roughly 30 days” obviously didn’t hold true. AOL also said they purge personally identifiable information after 30 days last year. To be fair, the search records did have personal ids removed. It’s simply that the searches themselves made at least one person identifiable.

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