Govern

AOL fired two employees and its CEO resigned after widespread criticism for the release of AOL members' web search data.

AOL CTO Maureen Govern "has decided to leave AOL effective immediately," AOL chief executive Jon Miller wrote in an email to employees Monday, and the researcher who was responsible for posting the data, along with the researcher's supervisor, were fired, reports Silicon.com. Miller in another email said AOL would establish a taskforce to develop privacy best practices and examine how long data should be saved.

John McKinley, president of AOL Digital Services, will become interim CTO. He served as CTO from 2003 to 2005.

"Staffing changes aren't going to get to the root of this problem," Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is quoted by the New York Times as saying. "It's a problem that reaches to the whole search industry, and not just AOL."

The EFF has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the data release.