Reports are flying around the Internet this morning that transcriptions and audio of some people’s Google Voice messages are turning up in public search results.
Try this search query, for example.
The thing is, there are only 35 results. If Google were actually indexing GV voicemails, there would be zillions of them, right?
So what’s the real story?
Well, it’s still not 100% clear, and I’m sure a more emphatic statement from Google will be coming very soon, but on the Google Voice support board, a Google employee explains (poorly) that these are voicemails that people have posted to the web voluntarily, and so Google indexed them, as is their habit. He also says they’ve changed the system so these will not be indexed in the future without explicit permission from the embedding site’s owner.
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.
Stand down. Nothing to see here.
This is all Apple’s and AT&T’s fault.
I love it. You guys are completely apologetic when Google screws something up, but chastise Microsoft to no end when they do something to this nature.
Waah! I posted transcripts of my phone calls to the web because I am a moron, and now people can read them! WAAAAAAAH!!!
@2 – Huh? The point is that Google didn’t screw up. Did you read the post? There’s nothing to chastise them for.