Apart from the quite adequate assortment of calculators, it's all a big heap of plain-Jane articles slotted into categories by simple tags.

...maybe you're better off thinking of it as a fat news feed, packed with ads and a layout that can get tiresome for long articles.

You can help celebrate Cancel The Account Day by looking at your credit card bill and see if there's a fee for a recurring service you don't need or want.

Then, call up the company and cancel your service! Save money! Hooray! — BEN POPKEN

This is a revision of their previous policy, shown in the second screenshot, mandating hanging up on customers who said they were recording the call.

AOL saw this story was blowing up and figured that people might try to duplicate Vincent's call. Rather than telling them to buzz off, which could've created another infamous bad customer service call, AOL told its reps to "continue to provide the outstanding customer service all our members deserve and expect." Clever, very clever.

Screenshots inside...

"Though it doesn't happen often, we have all experienced abusive caller situations. In some rare cases, after repeated warnings, these have resulted in our having to disconnect the call. This document clarifies AOL's hang-up guidelines and provides a consistent policy on when to escalate to your coach — and when to disconnect. NOTE: This does not apply to members who have disabilities that require them to record the call. (e.g. a Lifeline Service, etc.) It is not acceptable to disconnect a call with a disabled member if he or she is using this or any similar sort of service.

Currently, our Legal Department guidelines list only one situation where a call cannot continue.Because AOL does not allow callers to record our conversations, we may, after advising the caller of our policy, terminate or escalate the call when the caller refuses to discontinue recording. The following are guidelines for handling this type of call:

Required Warning Approach and Phrasing (A four-step process)

"Mr/Ms Member, I will be able to work with you on this; however, AOL does not allow our conversations to be taped. I cannot go further unless you discontinue taping the call. Are you ready to turn off the tape, so I can help you?" (A "Yes" answer allows the call to continue. A "No" requires the reading of the next statement to the member.)

"Mr/Ms Member, as I mentioned before, I will be able to assist you with this today; however, I cannot go further unless you discontinue taping the call. Are you ready to turn off the tape, so I can help you?" (A "Yes" answer allows the call to continue. A "No" requires the reading of the next statement to the member.)

"Mr/...Ms Member, At this time, because you continue to tape our conversation, I must disconnect the call, unless you are willing stop taping now. Are you ready to turn off the tape, so I can help you?" (A "Yes" answer allows the call to continue. A "No" requires that the call be ended at this point using the following statement.)

"Mr/Ms Member, I am now ending the call." End the call unless the caller will allow escalation. Regarding all other calls: Follow guidance as presented by the Training Department, Management, and your coaches. Consultants should use Customer Profile's scripting and approaches as determined by listening to the caller's identifying behaviors. Each call must be handled with the profile approach most closely matching the caller's behavior. Making an accurate initial assessment of the caller is an important part of the process. Should the call reach a point where the caller is too irate and/or abusive to allow a productive conversation to continue, the consultant should obtain callback information and escalate the call to a coach. The coach will use this information to initiate a follow-up contact with the member.

Example: Suggested Escalation Phrasing

"Mr. Member, I apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. Let me get a number where you can be reached, so I can have a supervisor return your call. Would daytime or evening work best for you?" As with any policies, if you have any questions, please see your coach. Article Audience: AOL, CS and Wal-mart Connect ______

Do not distribute this article in any form, to individuals who are not employees or agents of America Online, Inc., its parent, subsidiary, or affiliated companies."

"What to Do If a Member Informs CCC the Call is Being Recorded
Proper call handling procedures when a member is recording a call with Member Services.
Last Updated On: 6/23/06

Audience: All Queues

How to Properly Handle a Member Interaction if the Member is Recording the Call

While rare, the situation can arise where a member informs a consultant that they are recording the call. On the Phone or via eSupport: Member Advocacy Rules

Whether the interaction is over phone, e-mail or chat, you should always fulfill our shared commitment to Member Advocacy. Therefore, AOL's policy is if a member informs you they are recording a call, you should stay on the call and continue to provide the outstanding customer service all our members deserve and expect. This is the same expectation for eSupport Live and E-mail consultants — no matter the medium we use to offer assistance, our goal is to be the best Advocates possible. Please see your coach with any questions!

Do not distribute this article in any form to individuals who are not employees or agents of AOL LLC., its parent, subsidiary, or affiliated companies."

— BEN POPKEN

Truth 505 says,

"Whats up the consumerist I love the site, me and all my pals in Alb NM before we got laid off would get a good laugh the way u stick it to AOHell, anyways I'm writing you to let u know I'm a hiphop artist and I wrote a song about some of the stuff that went down @ aol the title of course is "F AOL" feel free to put it on your site and play it as much as you want, AOL has been a greedy company for years and its a shame they have no more call centers in the USA but call themselfs still AOL,, I'm not sure if u guys knew that but there are no more US reps there all outsourced to mexico india and the phillipians what a shame.........

HERES THE LINK TO MY SONG GIVE IT A SPIN IF U WANT PEACE"

Hot. When is the video coming out? — BEN POPKEN

f*** AOL [TRUTH 505]

All Floridians who filed a complaint with the AG's office are eligible to take part in the settlement. Visit Myfloridalegal.com for more info.

See, this is why it's important to file official complaints! — BEN POPKEN

AOL settles over consumer complaints [Miami Herald] (Thanks to Sean!)

Reader Robert saw a new tab on his AOL inbox with his screenname on it. When he clicked it, this showed up...

Which then brought him to FreeCreditReport.com, a site under investigation for, ""failure to adequately disclose negative option enrollment ... deceptive advertising, misleading domain name, and failure to honor cancellations."

Robert asks, "You would think AOL could pick a better partner ????"

We're sorry, Robert, that you're operating under the delusion that AOL cares about you.

Our tipster thinks this is so AOL can avoid responsibility for bad customer service/evil retention operators by blaming any shortcomings on a third party.

Not to mention it nicely dovetails with Time Warner Inc's overall strategy of acquiring communication companies and running them into the ground while squeezing out every last penny possible.

The sale is said to be finalized on 12/15, just in time for Christmas.

A reliable tipster reveals the buyer of the Ogden, UT, AOL call center that spawned John and Vincent's "Cancel The Account!!!!" call.

"Teleperformance USA is buying this call center — talk about taking a step down for those employees - they pay less and don't give a crap any more than aol

A moment of silence for these poor souls. May they some day complete their GED's and get better jobs.

UPDATE: A lively discussion about this has surfaced on a local newradio messageboard in Ogden. There's comments from both the "Merry Christmas AOL you SUCK" and "I work for AOL in Ogden. It is one of the best places I have ever worked" crowds.

AOL will close its call centers in Albuquerque, N.M., and Tucson, AZ, and sell its Ogden, UT call center. The online provider will also fire 1,400 call center employees.

These AOL call facilities contained hundreds of people trained to trick you into not cancelling your AOL account.

The centers will close in mid-December, just in time for Christmas.

Which means we only have sixty or so days before one-thousand, four-hundred, soulless, job-hungry, zombies are unleashed upon an unsuspecting American public.

AOL to lay off 1,400 call center workers [Cnet] (Thanks to Vincent!)

Needless to say, the lawsuit is about the colossal act of incompetence that breached the privacy of practically everyone who'd ever used AOL and led to hilarious YTMDs like this one

The attorney who filed the suit says that AOL should at least be trying to shut down the mirror sites of the search database and be forbidden from collecting data like this in the future. Given that AOL obviously can't be trusted with it, that seems pretty reasonable.

AOL Subscribers Sue Over Release of Search Data [Komotv.com]

One CSR took unscheduled time off work to try to rob a bank. Another was arrested for stealing credit card numbers from members. Then there was John Edgin whom she reported for threatening to shoot up the call center. He then proceeded to harass her by phone and constantly mailed her and people on the floor saying she was, "a lesbian, was fat, and fired people for no reason." Iit wasn't until his arrest for assault and battery of a police officer three years later that the abuse stopped.

As she writes, AOL hires "Only the best for our members!"

Read more...

They mean...

The billing has been cancelled, not the account, which is still yours and active. Which means you're still ours.

They say....

"First, your free service is active. This new service, which takes effect immediately, includes..."

They mean...

Just so you know, you're tacitly agreeing to this "service."

This is the same as local newspapers giving away free subscriptions to boost circulation numbers. Except in that case, they need your okay to start delivery, whereas in this, they're just tricking you into staying on the roster.

Previously: AOL's Guide To Just A Super Fun World-Class MRM Call

Previously: AOL's Guide To Just A Super Fun World-Class MRM Call

Click to expand.

OLD

NEW

Digg this story.

Our anonymous AOL call center insider mailed us again, this time with a scan of the Rosetta Stone that AOL's CSRs use to translate your strange gibberish asking for account cancellation into a language that they can understand: "Keep me signed up!"

Click on it to enlarge. The most important thing to notice here when trying to cancel your AOL account is the "Cancel Billing Close", located at the bottom of the scan. It reads:

Okay, I'm canceling billing on your account as of today. Keep in mind you can continue to use your AOL Mail and Software for free as long as you'd like to use them. Since we are no longer providing your Internet connection, we still want you to be able to enjoy AOL. You'll no longer be charged a monthly membership fee! for AOL. Does that take care of everything?

Most people at this point say "Yes!" but our correspondent warns us that, really, what you want to do is emphatically say "No. I want to be completely cancelled, not migrated to the free service." AOL's free service, after all, is a slippery slope. Our correspondent says: "If you say NO to the Cancellation Close - only then can we cancel and give a cancellation number."

Why you don't want AOL Free: "Even if the member completely cancels their account, they can go online to AOL.com and log in with their old/existing user name and password and their account will work just as the free account does, except they don't have an active billing account just a free unattached email service."

Of course, this AOL CSR "Guide to a World-Class MRM Call" script flow should only really have two branches. "If member says he wants to cancel, CANCEL immediately. Otherwise, try to retain."

There's just way too much observation in our correspondent's email to summarize. Specifically, there's a fascinating look at how AOL internally reacted to Vincent Ferrari, how the service got better for a time, but the introduction of AOL Free led to 7 out of 10 calls being cancellations, which just sent the customer service spiraling again into frustrating obfuscation.

The full email of our AOL insider, after the jump.

I have enclosed AOL's cancel script/flow. It's a 16x12 paper that is placed on our pods. I had to scan it in 3 sections and then use photoshop to stitch it. The original scan in photoshop (psd) extension is 63MB so I had to image size it several times to bring it down to 2 MB.

The script you are looking for is towards the bottom of the scan. It's called the "Cancel billing close"

Cancel billing close

Okay, I'm canceling billing on your account as of today. Keep in mind you can continue to use your AOL Mail and Software for free as long as you'd like to use them. Since we are no longer providing your Internet connection, we still want
you to be able to enjoy AOL. You'll no longer be charged a monthly membership fee! for AOL. Does that take care of everything?

After reading this script, almost all members say "YES". In their mind they think AOL is now closed and AOL is just being nice by offering courtesy services.

When they say YES, we have to read a second legal disclosure that makes the free service legal.

Free services disclosure.

"First, your free service is active. This new service, which takes effect immediately, includes unlimited access to AOL via a high-speed Internet connection or a different dial-up ISP purchased separately from your local cable or telephone
company.

This service plan does not include dial-up Internet access and does not include live customer support. Due to the immediate update in your account status you are agreeing to waive any prepaid dial-up time remaining in your current bill cycle.

Although you will no long! er be charged any monthly membership fee, you will be responsible f or any other charges you might have incurred since your last billing date as well as any outstanding balance on your account and any premium services to which you have separately subscribed. An additional $5 monthly
charge will still apply if premium services or additional fees are paid through your checking account or telephone bill.

If you need further assistance or have any questions about your current services, please visit KW: My Account.

Thank you for calling today. "

Also take note of the highlighted part at the bottom. This is what gets me. If the member is irate or frustrated with AOL service and they want their service canceled, we are to read the cancel billing close. If they say NO - only then can we cancel
and give a cancellation number.

If they say YES, then when we read the "free services disclosure", when we say " your free service is active" then th! ey start yelling again at which point we will read
the cancellation disclosure. It is honestly the most ridiculous script I have had to read in all my years here. We are making an already frustrated member even more frustrated.

Anyhow you can draw your own conclusions from the member connect call flow.

I was also reading some of the post-replys of your readers. One of them mentioned "It is illegal, he didn't think AOL can do that - he is right. The FTC regulates this however when we read the second disclosure, where we say "your free services is now active" the member has now given permission to AOL to keep his account open and active.

The next one showed her account being debited a penny. This is proof positive that AOL has kept her account open and never closed it. Closed accounts show "Account closed" or "Account terminated"

The only way ! to show "account closed" is to close down the account. Tell you r readers to get a cancellation number.

Here is a secret:

Even if the member completely cancels their account, they can go online to AOL.com and log in with their old/existing user name and password and their account will work just as the free account does, except they don't have an active billing account just a free unattached email service.

The only way to make sure an AOL account has been canceled is to have the consultant give you a cancellation number. Canceled accounts don't originate billing or marketing and their emails and other services can still be used. If I
didn't get AOL for free and I had to use it, this is exactly what I
would do.

Believe me when I tell you, my piers are not too thrilled about what we have to read. Many consultants including myself have appealed to our supervisors and their managers but AOL corporate truly believes this action can turn t! he tide of
cancels. After the Vincent Ferrari scandal, AOL took a huge PR hit and told all consultants to be nice and cancel accounts on demand. They even changed our pay, we no longer get paid by saving accounts. It was all about helping the member whether canceling or otherwise. Then the free service was announced and 7 of 10 calls were cancels. After a couple of weeks of this, AOL corp introduced the new script which basically turns 90% of those canceling into free services.

Sorry about the long email. There is so much I can tell you about AOL but my goal here is simply to raise eyebrows at AOL corp, enough to change the script flow to a script that is not duplicitous.

What they are having consultants do is shady at best, illegal at worst. Either way - wrong.

It sure the hell is.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has some interesting factoids about Davis Hawke, born one Andy Greenbaum. That's right, even as he told Fox News that, in his position of Commander of the Neo-Nazi group he founded in high school, "I plan to make the Final Solution a reality," and telling Rolling Stone, "sterilization is a must" for every Jew, he was hiding that his father was in fact Jewish!

After the SPLC discredited him and fellow white nationalists began deriding his as "The Kosher Nazi," Hawke turned to a life of spam, selling penis-enlargement pills.

Do you like the collage we made of Hawke photos?

AOL, leave these poor people alone. They've suffered enough having such a fruitloop in the family.

According to information we received from a current retention consultant, while charges are supposed to stop, all the billing info stays active, and the account is, "subjected to AOL marketing and third party marketing by email and by mail."

After working at a call center for seven years, he said, "billing errors were very common and by making your account free, this is no guarantee that the account will never be billed."

In addition, the retention consultant noted that AOL members can switch to the free service by going to Keyword: Change Plan, and choosing the free services option. "But now we are forcing them to have the free service anyway when they call to cancel even if they never want to use [AOL] again."

Why? "AOL Corporate is alarmed at how many members are canceling their accounts and not choosing the free services option, far more than previously expected," said the retention consultant.

America Online, will you never learn? No? Okay, good, because this stuff makes for great material. Really, you're a pleasure to work with.

Greg writes, "I am saddened by this news. It is very disappointing."

Yes, the feeling of melancholy it creates is something akin to the sensation the your personal search history had been released on the internet with enough info that people could identify you and knock on your door.

Linden is the same fellow quoted in NYT as saying of the history release, "I don't think there is a real privacy concern... especially in a day when we see millions of credit card numbers leaked by one group and millions of Social Security numbers released by another government agency."

Very sad, indeed.

"Leading the AOL Search & Navigation group in terms of research, evaluation and design of over 70 AOL search Systems for CNN, CompuServe, Netscape and AOL."

Gawd, what else has he fucked up?

(We also enjoyed the title of one of his papers, "Temporal Analysis of a Very Large Topically Categorized Web Query Log")

A fellow researcher of his and coauthor of several search optimization papers, Eric Jensen, told NYT, "Their [AOL's] response has served to inflame the situation rather than address the problem...I think that rather than making scapegoats out of people, you could have explained what this data was for."

Gee, firing the people directly responsible and blaming it on them without addressing underlying issues, where have we heard that one before?

Jensen added, "he had been told that the posting of the data had been approved by all appropriate executives at AOL, including Ms. Govern."

AOL: We care when the media makes us.

A cursory search revealed why Maureen didn't give a diddlydarn about AOL users: she used to work for Convergys.

Obviously they have funding problems.

AOL successfully sued spam king Davis Wolfgang last year for $12.8 million but has been unable to collect damages. Receipts submitted by AOL's lawyers reflect large purchases of gold bars, which AOL believes Davis buried on his parent's property with a shovel.

"AOL's lawyer notified the family that the company intends to use bulldozers and geological teams to hunt for gold and platinum on their property."

"I don't care if they dig up the entire yard. They're just going to make fools of themselves," said Peggy Greenbaum, Hawke's mother.

We think the grin on Davis' father's face says it all.

• AolStalker seems to have a smart search system and you can drill down to individual user profiles. The best of the bunch.
• AOLSearchDatabase gives the most comprehensive information. Too bad they didn't load all the data in.
• DontDelete's best feature is its Random User button. "HOURS of entertainment."
• AOLsearch displays specific user ID search results.
• AOL.Yogurtrat has a pretty good search and we enjoy the way the results are displayed.
• AOLSearchLogs lets you search by keyword or user ID. Pretty fast but you have to tab through long returns.

For the money, use AOL Stalker. If you know the user you're looking for, use AOL Search and just change around the ID number at the end.

UPDATE: Here's a powerful "Splunk'd" database of the AOL info. It looks daunting at first but in the end, this wins hands down as the best! [via BoingBoing]

The CSR is not a Nazi lieutenant: "I was just doing my job the way they told me to do it" is a perfectly satisfactory answer, coming from them. Which is why, as much as we loathed John, the AOL CSR who fielded the now infamous Ferrari Call... we still understood he was actually an exemplary employee, performing his job to the letter. This impression was solidified into cold certainty when we got our hands on AOL's retention manual. The problem in that call wasn't John. It was AOL.

Which is what makes us feel sorry for John, or any other AOL CSR. Most of the time, when they are fired, they are fired for doing their job exactly the way they were told to do it.

Or take Bubba, for example, who was fired from AOL just because the lawyers happened to be listening to the call for proof of the fallacy that it is easy to cancel AOL. His story, after the jump.

So I saw the story you did on John and one of the posts I noticed was something about how AOL fights tooth and nail to not give out unemployment. This is true and the reason is because of the ungodly turnover rate. If even half of them got unemployment they would be losing money just because of that. Anyway about a year ago I was made a sacrificial lamb to the AOL demigods. I was doing my 'saving' one day when out of the blue my manager walks up behind me in my cubicle and told me he needed to see me after this call. He had another manager with him and so I got nervous because anyone who has seen two managers walk up to another employee you usually saw them go into a room and the employee would come out crying and escorted to the door or they weren't seen again as they were escorted out the back way.

So I finish my call and we walk to the HR room where they sit down and proceed to tell me that I had taken a call and it wasn't good one and that they were suspending me with pay for the day and they would make a decision in later that day as to whether I could return or not. Now I am no dummy so I knew that later that day they would call and tell me they decided not to continue my employment and yaddda yaddda yaddda. I had way too many friends who got screwed over the same way. In this meeting I was baffled - I asked them what call were they referring to. My manager's response was that there was some lady who called and I made her mad and there were some people monitoring random calls and they needed to make this move. So I was totally baffled - I hadn't had any of the "VINNY" caliber calls at all and was having so many emotions running through my head. So we ended the meeting and told me he would call me later that day to let me know the decision but he told me "it don't look good for you though" with a smirk on his face. Well that evening about 5pm I got the call which I let go to Voicemail and they did say that they weren't going to continue my employment and I was terminated and needed to turn in my badge and secure ID and that if I had any questions to call him. I had a ton of freaking questions like what I had done. No one really did tell me specifically what I had done and all afternoon from the time I was escorted out of work to the time of the voicemail I couldn't think of any call and the call that I think he was referring to wasn't bad at all. It was one that I had cancelled and not had a verbal battle with and the lady wasn't mad - I wasn't mad I made my required 3 saves attempts and cancelled the account.

So the next morning I called my supervisor and asked him what was going on and why I was terminated. He responded again with because of a bad call. I told him I didn't have one bad call all day. He said it was some lady - so I asked him if he could be more specific on what happened in this call. He said that the call started off fine and then the lady got frustrated because I wouldn't cancel it after my first saves attempt (which everyone does). Then I made 2 more saves attempts and she was still frustrated and supposedly a room full of people were listening to this call off site somewhere and they called for my head. So I told him that I don't remember anyone getting upset - I asked him outright was the person mad or screaming - his response was 'no' - I asked if I was mad or screaming or condescending - 'no' - but she had just gotten frustrated and I didn't cancel it right away - I told him that we can't cancel it after the first saves attempt - that he required us to make 3 or more. His comeback was 'well if the customer is insistent then you do it right away' - but how can I know that after 1 attempt when you require 3 no matter what - 'well we are very clear on this' - I told him that it wasn't real clear and this was a crock of shit. At that point I demanded to hear the call. He stated that it wasn't recorded - I asked him if he heard it then and I wanted him to give his honest opinion and he said he never heard it as he wasn't in the room with them. So I asked him who was and he wouldn't tell me. So I asked him what happened at the end of the call - he told me that I cancelled the account and that everything was fine after that. So in my trying to figure out why I was fired I asked if I had made excessive attempts to cancel the account. He told me no that I had done my 3 - I asked him if the lady called back to complain about how bad I treated her if that was the case - he told me no. So I asked him if I put a false 'save' on the account - he told me no that I cancelled it correctly. I asked him if I had taken too long on the call ? He told me now it was 6 minutes. I asked him if he had any other calls recorded by their monitoring where I had a problem with this before and he told me no - none of the calls he listened to were bad at all. He just kept saying that those who listened to it made the call.

So I file for unemployment - knowing that they resist it but I think I have a pretty good case since I did everything I was supposed to do and they let me go. Their call not any fault of mine. So I fill out all the info and tell my side of the story. A few days later unemployment rep calls me and goes over the story again and I relay what happened. Then he says he would call me back. I thought that was odd but then it dawned on me - he had AOL HR on the other line and getting their story too. He calls me back 1 hour later and tells me that AOL was fighting it but after looking at their testimony and mine they did not at all provide anything compelling to support their argument that it was my fault. So I collected unemployment and about 4 months later I was speaking to an insider I knew at AOL and they told me the skinny. See the 'people' monitoring the call were some attorney's who were with some AOL officials who were monitoring calls to make sure AOL was complying with one of their class action lawsuits. Evidently AOL was telling the lawyers who were getting ready to sue AOL that it was easy to cancel AOL. Now I also found out that there was a meeting that morning (that I missed due to mechanical problems with my car) and the supervisor told everyone that people would be listening and don't do anything 'dumb' (wink wink) - what he meant was don't do 3 saves attempts - make it look like to whoever was listening that no evil was being done. So they listened - heard the 3 saves attempts - and AOL's response to them was that I was a rogue and I was terminated. When it couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact it was more of sell out job - AOL management doesn't back anyone else on the bottom rung even if they are dead wrong. That is my story.

Her searches included "numb fingers," "60 single men" and "dog that urinates on everything."

"Those are my searches," she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her."

You can tell the NYT editor's directives were "Ok, ID someone but make sure their results are totally innocuous, you know, fit to print."

(Thanks to Andrew!)

Wow! User-generated content is an awesome way for companies to harness the inherent marketing potential of the internet!

We speculated that AOL paid John a sizable bonus package to encourage his silence, until now...

A source close to the situation told us that John did not receive a severance package and AOL told him to not to apply for unemployment either.

AOL was unresponsive to our request for comment to verify this statement.

Let's get this straight. So you're John, and you're just going along, doing the job AOL told you to do, the way they taught you. One day, someone records one of your calls and spread it around the internet. You end up humiliated in the mainstream press, AOL publicly disowns you, terminates your contract without notice, tells you to forget your unemployment bennies... and you don't even get a little payola?

Classy. That is one seriously scaped goat.

AOL's intent was to provide open source tools to academics researching the science of how people search for information.

In reporting the story, NYT gave the kill quote to Greg Linden, CEO of Findory, a news search company,

The uproar, he said, would hurt university researchers trying to explore new types of searches who did not have access to data about users. "This is going to slow progress of those who want to find ways to help people find what they are looking for faster," he said.

Bad bloggers, pointing out privacy breaches! Although it's beyond us why anyone would find the searches useful.

Did you see what these people typed in? Any librarian would self-combust at how poorly formulated the queries were. Didn't anyone teach these people about Boolean operators?

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it. 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."

Guess what? If personal data is collected, some day it may be improperly divulged and used by hacky writers to make endless blogfood from "strange things are being done in the same households as searches for mundane crap."

The question now is what will be done with the data already released? We shall wait, and breathlessly watch Digg.

They wanted their users examined in aggregate. Look at all the dot graphs and charts. Watch the pretty gradient map of America. Revel in the statistical analysis. Wallow in the private made public.

Previously, the DOJ asked all the major search engines for a swath of their data. Everyone complied (except for Google). Now AOL released the info to the public, with the intent of attracting profit. Not to mention the handy benefit of, "getting others to figure out their metrics for them for free," says Vinny.

AOL: We don't give a fuck.

"Combine these ego searches with porn queries and you have a serious embarrassment. Combine them with "buy ecstasy" and you have evidence of a crime. Combine it with an address, social security number, etc., and you have an identity theft waiting to happen. The possibilities are endless."

As of 10pm Sunday night, AOL took down both the data and pages that referred to it.

However, the data has already been downloaded numerous times and passed around. Peoples are racing to develop easily searchable databases.

They might come across the entry for User 17556639 who searched for: "how to kill your wife," "wife killer," "how to kill a wife" and "poop."

Scatological murderer or niche-interest crime screenwriter? The possibilities are endless with the power of conjecture.

The record starts out blandly enough in March. First he's concerned about how long it takes broken legs to heal. Then he investigates human mold. Perhaps staying at home after an accident? Then he peeks into a little dog sex, but the leash isn't very long, the most prurient site he reaches being SFweekly.com, a regular ol' newspaper.

Later that day he looks up flowers. flowers aster. butterfly orchid. The next day, more flowers, followed by a little forced rape porn, testicle festivals and slow-dancing steps. Must be planning a big night.

Fast-forward to May...

Queries include: beauty and the beast disney porn, holocaust rape, japanese child slave, molestation and rape porn, virtual children, 3d molestation and rape porn, topped off with a little, "oh i like that baby. i put on my robe and wizards hat."

But since he was using AOL he never got to see anything that might have potentially tainted his fragile, mold-ridden mind.

Download User 927's file

Some people consider it a privacy invasion, even though the user id's are anonymized. 13SpiceyKandygrrl becomes User 10004.

You can download the full data set at one of the many working mirrors here. (A little bird tells us that a more user-friendly way to look the might be showing up soon...)

The point of the release seems to be to earn cred with data-mining orgs or any other research endeavor, or simply to put up the OPEN sign on the user info shop.

We're going to use it for our science fair project this year. Watch out, electric potato!

Simply download the spreadsheet and keep track of your saves, cancels and hours worked. Watch with glee as each account not canceled causes the monthly to rise and rise. Try and see if you can get the big red GROSS over $100,000! Remember, the top 2% win a free trip to Mexico! Ole!

This Excel document comes to us courtesy of the former elite AOL retention consultant we interviewed. The schema is based on the bonus structure in August 2004. He says, "This changed several times though out the six years I was there. The numbers that are entered in there are my numbers the month before I left. Not my best but a good average."

The bonus structure is much stricter now.

Remember AOL Wants to Eat the Dead? Or AOL Wants to Sell Internet to the Dead? AOL-owned Netscape called bullshit on these stories.

And yet, they still keep on flooding in. The latest comes via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and details Maxine Gauthier's nine month struggle to cancel the AOL account of her dead father. She's called dozens of times, most of these occasions ending with the (now laid-off) representative hanging up on her. They just didn't believe the man was dead.

As proof, Gauthier tried to fax in her father's obituary. AOL's reaction? "An AOL service guy told me to stop complaining and learn to use a computer," she said. "Then he hung up."

Someone should fax AOL's death certificate and prove to them that they are truly dead.

Even dead people can't escape AOL [STLtoday.com] (Thanks, Nick!)

Back in 2003, Kurt Walker was an Associate General Manager in the Oklahoma call center. His nickname, "The Hatchet," derived from the "gleam in his eyes and a smile on his face" when motivating the Saves Coaches to fire employees.

One saves coach, Dan Critchfield, sent around a mass email to his higherups, declaiming, "I have grown weary of Kurt telling...on an almost daily basis, in our Team huddles...About how much "fun it was" to fire certain people." Of Kurt, Dan said:

"My true impression is that of a sociopath with no conscience."

After an email was sent around encouraging saves coaches to up their numbers, Kurt sent his own to hammer in the message. While his took a strong tone, with lines like, "10 calls a day will keep the unemployment office at bay" and "Do these things mean anything to you?" he seemed to feel he was looking out for his worker's best interests. "You may not agree with me right now, but I am going to force you to make money," Kurt wrote.

After his email didn't go over well, Kurt arranged an emergency team potluck. One that was meticulously organized

There were to be two green veggies, two side dishes, two salads and three deserts. No more, no less. Everything was micromanaged to the last asparagus.

The sender of this email, who we previously interviewed, doesn't know what happened to Dan. "I am sure he was fired," he says. "That is what we refer to as "Final Flame Email". These were popular...their last way to stab at the company they had come to hate."

Presented in its epic entirety after the jump...

Red arrows point to the juicy bits.

"The company estimates that it will lose more than six million paying subscribers over the next year. "

People might like to think that it was the exposure given Vincent Ferrari's call that jump started the retention center flush. That may be too rosy a view. Maybe there's a certain point where there's simply too many people trying to cancel, too eagerly and it's more cost-effective to quickly process them than tourniquet the attrition.

Like the wise willow, AOL bent to the farts of change.

We believe this is called "telemarketing."

He explained to the rep, "...the only reason I had AOL as long as I did was that I had set my father up with a screen name six years ago and didn't have the heart to make him change to another ISP and e-mail system....Well, pops is [dead]...and hence my cancellation. Sorry, but I'd rather stick bamboo chutes under my fingernails than use AOL."

Instead of hundreds of discs in the mailbox, perhaps America can look forward to a currently unspecified number of calls on the phone line...

Bonus game: What issue of 2600 contained an article about the Merlin program used by retention consultants?