AOL members sue over search data release
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Three AOL members sued the company over the release of their search engine records.
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SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Computer Inc is suing anonymous people who leaked details about new products by posting information on the Internet, court documents showed last Friday.
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Sears Holdings is facing a class-action lawsuit after&#160;making the purchase history of its customers public&#160;on its Managemyhome.com Web site.The lawsuit seeks damages as well as an accounting by Sears to determine whether the Web site was misused by criminals. It was filed on Friday by New Jersey resident Christine Desantis, who is represented by KamberEdelson, a technology law firm. KamberEdelson is best known for its recent settlement with social networking site Facebook over its sending of unwanted text messages to recycled cell-phone numbers.&quot;It&#39;s a pretty simple case,&quot; said Jay Edelson, a partner with the Chicago-based law firm. &quot;Sears decided to put private information of its customers up on the Web site and make it publicly available. They did it without telling their customers that it was going to happen ... and they really did it for their own financial reasons.&quot;Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips and get home renovation ideas. The Web site had a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that ostensibly was designed to help users look up past purchases.Last Thursday, researchers at security vendor CA pointed out that the feature could be used to look up the purchase history of any Sears customer, an apparent violation of the company&#39;s privacy policy.Manage My Home could easily have been misused by criminals, Edelson said. For example, a robber could gain access to a victim&#39;s home by posing as a Sears repair person, using the information available on the site. That could be incredibly scary, he said. &quot;They have a duty to keep that information away from the public.&quot;Sears disabled the &quot;Find your products&quot; feature&#160;on Friday, saying it would re-introduce the feature once the company figures out a way of ensuring that the information cannot be viewed by unauthorized third parties.However, the retailer was informed of the problem weeks before it took the feature off-line, Edelson said.In late December, CA researchers also criticized Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;onto the desktops of some members of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.KamberEdelson is also investigating that matter, Edelson said.&#160;
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Judge halts guilty plea by ex-AOL employee who sold e-mail addresses, questions new anti-spam law. NEW YORK  - A federal judge has refused to accept a guilty plea from a former America Online employee
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Privacy breach suit launched A trio of AOL subscribers are suing the media giant over the public release of search engine queries.â¦
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Polaris missile The biggest names on the internet have been sued by a patent holding company which claims the firms are violating its rights by automatically routing email messages.â¦
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Four of the nation's largest online providers yesterday announced a new round of lawsuits aimed at e-mail spammers, including the first major case involving spam sent via an instant messaging service.
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Online search companies Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft are tightening their privacy policies in the face of mounting public, congressional and regulatory agency concern about the vast amounts of personal data they gather and store.
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A California-based pornographer said on Monday it has sued Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , alleging that its leading Internet search engines are
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Apple Computer Inc. is set to sue several anonymous people who leaked details about new products by posting information on the Internet, it has been claimed.
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America Online on Thursday confirmed it is testing a new search engine that scans for files on a PC&#39;s hard drive, mirroring a similar product unveiled this week by Google.
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Apple Computer is suing anonymous people who leaked details about new products by posting information on the Internet.
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The ACLU and Muslim advocacy groups sued the FBI and the Justice Department on Tuesday, alleging that authorities failed to turn over records detailing suspected surveillance of the Muslim-American community.
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(InfoWorld) - Three people have sued AOL LLC over the company'sÂ controversial release of member search-engine records, in what their lawyers are billing as the first such lawsuit seeking national class action status. The three AOL members charge the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary with, among other things, privacy violation, false advertising and unjust enrichment. Two unnamed AOL members residing in California, and Kasadore Ramkissoon, who lives in New York, filed their lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit seeks monetary relief for all affected AOL members in the U.S. whose search data was disclosed without consent from January 1, 2004 until the present. The plaintiffs also ask the court to instruct AOL not to store or maintain users' Web search records, and to destroy the Web search records it currently has. The lawsuit stems from AOL's decision to post on its research Web site about 20 million search records from about 658,000 of its members, covering the three-month period between March and May. AOL didn't disclose the names of the members, but it grouped each member's records with a unique number. This made it possible to see what each individual searched for. The data included search queries, as well as Web sites the members clicked on to. When the issue became a privacy scandal in August, AOL apologized and pulled the data from the Web site, but by then the data set had been downloaded multiple times and the records remain available online. The records contain sensitive information like credit card, telephone and Social Security numbers, birth dates, full names and addresses. The New York Times tracked down one of the affected members and, with her permission, interviewed and identified her. The law firm Berman DeValerio Pease Tabacco Burt & Pucillo represents the plaintiffs. A copy of the complaint is posted on theÂ law firm's Web site. The scandal has had significant repercussions within AOL. Its Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern resigned and two other employeesÂ were fired. Last week, in an e-mail sent to all employees and obtained by IDG News Service, AOL's Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Miller referred to the incident as "the search data debacle" and announced AOL plans to hire, for the first time ever, a chief privacy officer. In the e-mail, Miller outlined a reorganization of AOL's business structure, which will include a unit solely dedicated to what he termed the "protection" of AOL consumers. Last week, in its latest search engine usage study, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that in August, people in the U.S. ran 18.2 percent fewer queries on AOL's search engine, compared with August 2005. Nielsen/NetRatings didn't venture any explanations for the drop, but industry observers have pointed directly at the search data scandal as the culprit. Among the top five search engine providers, AOL was the only one whose usage share shrunk last month. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against AOL in August over the search data release. AOL declined to provide comment for this story. Â
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A California-based pornographer says it has sued Google, alleging that its leading internet search engines are illegally allowing people to view hijacked versions of its nude photos and to access its website with stolen passwords.
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Today the US Department of Justice launched an assault on P2P filesharing. Using search warrants, they searched five homes and the offices of one ISP.
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An adult Web site publisher is suing Google, saying the search engine company made it easier for users to see the site&#39;s copyrighted nude photographs without paying or gaining access through the proper channels.