San Francisco — Based on various reports that appeared this morning, it looks as though Google was narrowly escaped from weathering a storm of bad publicity. According to a recent report from a technology blog site that claimed to have discovered an apparent transcripts of some voice mail messages from “Google Voice” that Google indexed, and these were showing up in search results. Following the brouhaha that the company’s nearly universally lauded service, Google Voice, was actually compromising user security in a major way. Google has decided to modify its policy and not index them to prevent this from happening, but some of the damage is already done, the company said Monday.
Since its introduction in March, Google Voice enabled users to post voice mail transcripts on public Web pages. But, according to various reports, Google search has actually been crawling user voicemails, making them public and discoverable. About 31 seemingly random voicemails were apparently discoverable through search.
Still, Google Voice users will be able to maintain this practice, the voice mail text will now be off-limits to search engine crawlers.
“We can certainly realize that people are willing to make their voice mails public on their own sites, but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent these voice mails from being crawled so their content will not be indexed,” a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail.
The blog post by Nilay Patel on Engadget.com quoted that various pages of transcribed Google Voice voice-mail messages that had been retrieved, appeared to be simply tests. However, the post further stated that a “couple of eye-popping” messages were also retrieved.
“We are not exactly sure what is going on here, but it surely appears that at least some Google Voice voicemails are being indexed and made publicly available somehow,” the blog post said. Engadget said it had retrieved voice-mail messages left during a period from some months ago until yesterday. “Clearly an ongoing issue — hopefully Google patches this up awful fast,” the post said.
Google apparently enforced the change at least several weeks ago, according to this entry in the Google Voice Help Forum.
“Since the initial concept behind posting a voicemail was precisely to share it with others, previously we did not restrict crawling of voicemail messages users posted on the web,” Google said in the statement. “However, we can certainly realize that people would wish to make their voicemails public on their own sites, but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent these voicemails from being crawled so their content will not be indexed.”
But finally, the whole thing was turned out to be topsy-turvy — Google was never making private content public. Rather, it was just automatically indexing already public content. Still, the company responded and eventually backed off of the initial feature.