NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Three AOL subscribers are suing the company under privacy laws for releasing their personal search histories, according to a filing made Friday.

The suit comes after some 20 million AOL search records made by about 658,000 subscribers over a three-month period were posted on the company's Web site in July and made available for downloading.

The storage and public release of the personal search histories violates federal and state privacy laws, the suit claims.

"They make a record of all of your search queries then store the information. They are not supposed to disclose it to anyone," Manuel John Dominguez, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, told CNN.

The suit seeks an end to the storage of search records and is believed to be the first federal lawsuit brought in the wake of the data breach, Dominguez said.

AOL, the Internet unit of Time Warner (Charts), declined to comment on the lawsuit. Spokesman Andrew Weinstein said the data breach was a mistake and that the company has launched an internal investigation to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Weak sales and operating profit at AOL have weighed on shares of Time Warner, which have underperformed the stocks of media rivals CBS (Charts), News Corp. (Charts) and Walt Disney (Charts) this year.

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