AOL has really dropped the ball this time. After announcing that it will be firing 5000 workers, getting the entire blogosphere in a huff over its customer retention policy and apparently billing the dead AOL has decided that it can still do more to destroy its floundering reputation.

In order to promote some research endeavour, AOL released the search records of over 650,000 users. This wouldn’t be so bad (the users are not identified by name) except that lots of people tend to use search engines to search their own personally identifiable information. Needless to say, this brilliant strategy to protect its users against being found out was quickly broken.

I am going to give AOL some credit. They openly admitted that they made a huge mistake by releasing this data, and they apologized profusely. Unfortunately, apologies do not help Thelma Arnold, the 62 year old woman in Georgia who likes to search for “numb fingers” and “dogs that urinate on everything”.

AOL, take note.