Academics are fired with diametrically opposed viewpoints concerning the appropriateness of using the leaked AOL data for academic research purposes. Post the leakage, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, downloaded the data right away. But when the issues with the privacy breaches erupted, he decided against using them.
"Now it's sitting there, in cold storage," said 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."
Academics seem to be torn between rich research material and integrity. William Cohen, an associate research professor in the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, said, "By knowing what someone searched for in the past, you can do a lot better at answering a query," Cohen said, using his vacation spot of Charleston, South Carolina, as an example. "If you look at my recent searches, they might have something to do with vacation homes, Folly Beach, and car rentals. So if I search for seafood restaurants, it's more likely I'll be looking for one in the Charleston area, and if I say 'Charleston,' it's much more likely to be South Carolina than West Virginia."
Cohen said, "The privacy issues are something I'd have to think through very carefully."
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