A lawsuit has been filed against AOL for disclosing private search queries without the consent of AOL members. The lawsuit is referring to AOL's recent data debacle when several months of search queries for 650,000 AOL members were released onto the Internet.
Three AOL members have sued AOL LLC, the Internet division of Time Warner Inc., saying the company violated their privacy by posting their search queries online, Berman DeValerio Pease Tabacco Burt & Pucillo announced today.
The lawsuit is the first class action filed in federal court as a result of AOL's July 31 public release of queries made by hundreds of thousands of AOL members without their permission.
Berman DeValerio (www.bermanesq.com) filed the class action last Friday, September 22, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit, filed as C-06-5866, seeks damages on behalf of all AOL members in the United States whose Internet search query data was disclosed without consent from January 1, 2004 until the present.
AOL did apologize and even fired the employees responsible for releasing all the search queries. However, it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle for the personal search histories that were released.
