In 2006, AOL released 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users, inadvertently revealing the very private desires of specific individuals along with their identities. Three years later, it remains the best-known and most-cited data breach.
What you may not know, however, is that AOL released the data on purpose. No laptop was lost, no database hacked. And why did they release it? For research, as a gesture of goodwill, “to reach out to the academic community with new research tools.”
The biggest loser in this case was not AOL. It was you and me, the academic community, the general public, the ordinary individual. Now, no one wants to share private information, even when it could help solve public problems.
We at CDP believe that public access to the rapidly growing stores of privately held personal data is crucial to a healthy democracy, informed policy-making and intelligently regulated markets.
Our mission is to encourage and enable the disclosure of personal data for public re-use through the creation of a technology and legal framework for anonymized data-sharing.
As of July 16, 2009, the Common Data Project is officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
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