It is one of the frustrations of being an academic researcher in a world that has grown highly commercial. Data is everywhere, but there is precious little of it for university researchers to work with. Raw data about people’s online behavior — the grist for many an academic researcher’s mill — remains locked up inside large companies, accessible only to a subset of corporate researchers.

The AOL incident has set off a flurry of divergent opinions in the academic community over the appropriateness of using the data for academic research.