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Gmail Reveals the Names of All Users

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-so-anonymous-now dept.

ihatespam writes "Have you ever wanted to know the name of admin@gmail.com? Now you can. Through a bug in Google calendars the names of all registered Gmail accounts are now readily available. All you need to find out the names of any gmail address is a Google calendar account yourself. Depending on your view this ranges from a harmless "feature" to a rather serious privacy violation. According to some reports, spammers are already exploiting this "feature"/bug to send personalized spam messages."

6 of 438 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This only punishes the foolish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Gmail strips out punctuation. So email to First.Last@gmail.com goes to the same inbox as FirstLast@gmail.com

  2. Re:This only punishes the foolish by Dun+Malg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know individuals with a hell of a lot of sense who would give their real names in such a situation.

    So? Part of the reason for that is that full names in and of themselves are not really a security risk. I walk around all day in public with an ID badge that gives my first and last name. Big deal. Our names are our public identifiers.

    --
    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  3. Re:This only punishes the foolish by hal9000(jr) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    for a small business owner, why not. I manage a few websites. Very, very small. Less than 20 people have write access. They wanted email. some users would use outlook or outlook express, others wanted a web mail front end. The email client the hosting service had was horrible so I hooked them up with a gmail hosted services. It works very, very nicely for them.

    there are some cases where Google is a good alternative to other options.

  4. Serious FERPA Violation by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Families Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 allows a student at a university to require the university to not release their name to anyone. For example, if you check for my name at my school's phonebook, you'll find I'm not listed. If you call my registrar's office and ask for information on me, they'll tell you that they don't have a student by my name. You see, it's against the law for them to even confirm that I'm a student.

    Since many schools have outsourced their email systems to Gmail, anyone can generate a full roster of student names through this trick. This could obviously result in many violations of FERPA.

  5. Spam doesn't worry me, it's privacy. by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This goes well beyond the scope of SPAM. Once they match your real name with your e-mail, they can start finding out what you do online, what sites/forums you visit, etc (Google knows everything).

    I'm much more worried about ID thieves finding out about my life than about getting personalized spam.

  6. Re:This only punishes the foolish by billj04 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This actually is a security risk -- a lot of websites use your name as proof that their email is legitimate, and not originating from a phisher. For example, eBay's emails contain the following text at the top:

    eBay sent this message to FULL NAME (account)
    Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay. Learn more.

    The "Learn more" link takes you to http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/name-userid-emails.html which explains

    Since people who send out spoof emails often don't have your first and last name as well as eBay User ID, receiving an email that contains this information should increase your confidence that the email was sent by eBay.