Time Warner's America Online revealed that it had severed ties with its chief technology officer after the online service released three months of search queries from 658,000 subscribers which, although "anonymized" by removing user account details, still contained enough data to possibly identify some of the users. The privacy breach underscored the perils of supposedly "anonymous" Internet profiling and raised the hackles of privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF, a week earlier, had urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate AOL and force the company to change its privacy practices.

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