more discussion on AOL search data ethics

Katie Hafner has a NY Times article today, Researchers Yearn to Use AOL Logs, but They Hesitate. It seems there's been some debate in the academic research community on whether it is ethical to dive into the juicy corpus of the AOL search data. I'm happy to see that Prof. Jon Kleinberg of Cornell decided against using it, but the conflicted views of others quoted in the article are disappointing. As I argued in my original post below, I think it's clearly not ethical for academic researchers to use the data. However, very smart people such as Ed Felten, Danny Sullivan, and Carlo Longino feel otherwise, and their diverse perspectives are instructive.