Google gives Voice users ability to not share their messages
Why wouldn't you want your voicemail indexed?
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Google was forced into some quick tweaking of Google Voice last month after users spotted that transcripts of voicemail messages were being served up in search results.
An alert user spotted what is clearly an oversight by the firm whose global mission is to index everything that moves. Or doesn't move.
The service allows users to "share" their messages, but the questioneer was irked to find transcripts of Voice messages turning up in search results.
The questioner hit Google's own help forum to ask "Why are voicemail messages searchable?!? This appears to be a serious privacy breach which is alarming at best."
Google wonk Vincent Paquet quickly put his mind at rest, stating that: "Since the initial idea behind posting a voicemail, was precisely to share it with others, we did not restrict crawling of those messages that users post on the web."
But he added: "We can certainly understand that users would want to make them public on their sites but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent those to be crawled so only the site owner can decide to index them."
As one posted to Boygeniusreport said, "Lol you really think google would make a programming mistake like that??" ®
COMMENTS
Your password has been reset to
Wonder how many of the messages would be "Your password has been reset to ..." which would give all script kiddies an easy ride? Or would the message be "Paris were going out to a night club so give us a call at 555-1234"?
Engage brain
'' As one posted to Boygeniusreport said, "Lol you really think google would make a programming mistake like that??" ''
<sarcasm> Lol, you really think people would make the difference between a programming mistake and a faulty business case </sarcasm>
This is *not* a programming mistake - this is a situation which nobody at Google thought of (I hope). Happens a lot in any company; something happens to the brand-new *complex* system, fingers are pointed, and some poor schmuck in the programming department turns around and says "we never even thought of *that*".
I can see why a company which is *geared* towards indexing/search-results would have automatically indexed and presented the results by default. Because that's what they do, by default. Until someone realises that the default doesn't apply in this case.
Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!
Just because Google put a fix in that will hide the transcription from "public search records" doesn't mean that they are still not automatically transcribing them for their own internal uses, now does it?
Think about it. The privacy breach still exists. That is of course if you are using Google voice, Google Brother is still listening.
And how well do you trust Google?
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