When Findory.com CEO Greg Linden, an expert in search and personalization technologies, stumbled across a massive cache of AOL user search data on Friday, offered for free by the company's labs, he didn't think of the privacy implications -- he just thought of the great fun he and other researchers could have using the data.

But Caltech student Adam D'Angelo raised the alarm, pointing out that the data, even with user names stripped out, still contained very personal information about what AOL users were looking for on the Web. "This was not a leak -- this was intentional," writes D'Angelo. "In their desperation to gain recognition from the research community, AOL decided they would compromise their integrity." AOL Research rapidly took the data set off its website as the news spread.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," says AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein. "It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant. We're absolutely not defending this."

The news unleashed a predictable uproar -- the search logs, after all, contain the kind of data that Google went to court to prevent federal investigators from getting their hands on. But it's also ironic that AOL, which used to tout its stringent privacy protections in TV advertisements, released this data. Times have changed -- as has AOL's privacy policy.

It turns out that the disclosure of the research didn't break AOL's latest privacy rules. AOL tells users that it may disclose such information, stripped of user names, for research purposes -- but who knew that "research purposes" included offering that information up for anyone on the Internet to download? As blogger Greg Yardley notes, "Expectations of privacy online are utterly unrealistic and delusional anyway."

Was AOL in its rights to release this data? Leave a comment and tell us what you think.