Today seems to be a day for scandals.

10 days ago, AOL Research released search queries spanning 3 months from 658,000 randomly selected subscribers. The 2.12 GB of data were released as a 439 MB download on AOL Research’s website. While the data uses anonymous user IDs, it is possible to identify a user based on his or her search queries (for example, a lot of users search for their own name). AOL has since pulled the data and apologized for this privacy scandal. I commend them for making this valuable data available to researchers, but couldn’t they have done this in a less public manner that respects privacy concerns? If you haven’t downloaded a copy of the data yet, you can get it from this mirror.

The second scandal is a photo scandal at Reuters. Apparently a freelance photographer working for Reuters, Adnan Hajj, has either doctored (edited on a computer) or staged pictures from Lebanon. Some of his pictures were featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The scandal started when a blog identified a picture as clearly doctored via Photoshop, which Reuters has pulled since. After more allegations surfaced, Reuters removed all 920 pictures by Adnan Hajj from its database. It seems to be rather obvious that his pictures are no longer credible. For example, two pictures of the same destroyed bridge (according to the caption) showed two completely different bridges. Or, the same building was destroyed in an identical manner twice in two weeks. The Power Line blog covers this particular scandal closely.

The Internet world seems to move a lot faster than mainstream media. The New York Times finally picked up on both scandals:

• AOL article
• Reuters article

edited 2006-08-09 to include NYT articles