Mondaq reports a federal judge has given “final approval to a class-action settlement between AOL and a class of more than 650,000 AOL members whose search queries were disclosed to the public” in a case that “has become almost folklore in the privacy world.” The case stems from a 2006 incident where AOL employees released search query data from members for research purposes. “Although the members had been supposedly anonymized, some of them were re-identified based solely on the patterns in their searches,” the report states. The settlement includes $5 million payments to class members as well as almost $1 million in legal fees.
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