Google Voice users may find transcribed voicemails floating freely in the cloud

How comfortable are you entrusting your personal deets to Google?

That’s the question a lot of Google Voice early adopters are asking themselves after a technology blog found a whole bunch of transcribed voicemails, some seemingly private, floating around in Google search results. Some are clearly tests, most appear innocuous, but there appear to be data tidbits like phone numbers and scheduling details in the mix as well.

After a few blogs picked up the quirk, Google stepped in to explain:

“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.”

So it appears the crawling was a bad idea and they’re not doing it anymore. Still, kind of worrisome.

[Via Engadget]

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