On August 4th, 2006, AOL, the Dulles, VA division of Time Warner, posted a compressed text file on one of its websites containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period, intended for research purposes by researchers at Universities. News of the search data posting spread through online blogs and news posting sites until it was being downloaded by any number of curious surfers. AOL acknowledged it was a mistake and removed the file from its servers 3 days later on August 7th. AOL claimed a well intentioned employee / researcher posted the file without the approval or knowledge of the company.

Though AOL removed the data from its servers the damage was already done. The file is still publically avaliable from mirror sites online. Though none of the records on the file are personally identifiable per se, certain keywords contain personally identifiable information, as certain searchers in the data queried their own names, as well as their addresses, social security numbers and the like. Each user is identified on this list by a unique sequential key, which enables the compilation of a user's search history.

On August 21, 2006, AOL announced that CTO Maureen Govern had resigned and the media quoted an insider as saying that two employees had been fired: the researcher who released the data, and his immediate supervisor, who reported to Govern.