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Google Voice Mails Found In Public Search Engine

Posted by timothy on from the wouldn't-mind-being-able-to-put-some-there dept.

bonch writes "Google Voice Mails have been discovered in Google's search engine, providing audio files, names, and phone number as if you were logged in and checking your own voice mail. Some appear to be test messages, while others are clearly not. Google has since disabled indexing of voice mails outside your own website."

5 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. I dont want to listen to my voice mails by lyquidevil · · Score: 5, Funny

    and dont really care if you do. But bad move google.

  2. User action? by jbohumil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This doesn't sound like a bug or leak, more like some users set up links or otherwise made their messages public.

    1. Re:User action? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly.

      IMHO, totally a non-issue: google doesn't spider their own service, but if you post links to your voice mail on a public page with a permissive robots.txt, it gets spidered and shows up in search results with them or anyone else.

      I completely get why Google is now removing these from search results -- they must be seen to be fixing this before it blows up as a scandal -- but shouldn't this sort of media panderage qualify as the evil they purportedly "don't be"? You'd think they're big enough to stand up and enlighten morons about robots.txt specifically, and about the general truth that when you post something on the internet, it's there forever.

  3. Article is already updated by vxvxvxvx · · Score: 5, Informative

    UPDATE: It seems as if these voicemails have been publicly posted/shared online and Google indexes them. Here’s official word:

    “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 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.”

  4. The Real Problem is ... by itzfritz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The real problem, IMO, is that Google Voice voicemails are world-readable to begin with. The only security is the URL scheme. If that can be reverse engineered, the privacy of all google voice users will be in danger. (fyi I have tested this myself. The url scheme is "https://www.google.com/voice/fm/20-digit account id/long b64 encoded binary string", and these urls can be viewed by unauthenticated users. Note the use of https; while no man in the middle will read my voicemail, the man on one end can ;)