As it stands now, little with regard to search queries is private. No laws clearly place search requests off-limits to advertisers, law enforcement agencies or academic researchers, beyond the terms that companies set themselves.

"This is a discussion that we as a society need to have," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Mr. Bankston’s group, which is spearheading a class-action lawsuit against AT&T for sharing consumer phone records with the National Security Agency, issued an alert this week calling the AOL incident a "Data Valdez," asserting that it may be in violation of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, which regulates some forms of online communications.

Sounds like EFF may eventually pursue a class-action case against AOL.

"This AOL breach is just a tiny drop in the giant pool of information that these companies have collected. The sensitivity of this data cannot be overemphasized."

A similar sentiment was at the heart of an e-mail message sent to employees by AOL’s own chief executive, Jonathan F. Miller, on Wednesday.

"We work so hard to protect this kind of information, and yet it was made public without review by our privacy experts, undermining years of industry leadership in a single act," Mr. Miller wrote. "The reaction has been a powerful reminder of how quickly a company such as AOL can forfeit the good will we have worked for years to engender."

This is Friedman's Super-Empowered Man. In the military, they talk of the Strategic Corporal, [2].