Thousands Of Privacy Incidents Were Self-Reported By Google Employees
Google is one of the biggest tech companies on the face of the planet, and as expected, its security is very tight. However, that doesn’t mean it is impenetrable, and for a company like Google which has so many other platforms, applications, and services under its belt, it’s not surprising to hear that there can be occasional breaches happening.
An internal Google database was leaked to 404 Media, revealing thousands of user privacy incidents that had occurred with different Google services, apps, and platforms between 2013 and 2018. All of these incidents were self-reported by Google employees and were then ranked in terms of priority.
For instance, some of the privacy incidents that were deemed to be a high priority in the database include an episode where it was discovered children’s voices were being recorded through the Gboard microphone, license plate information seen in Street View in Google Maps was being collected, and private YouTube video content from Nintendo was leaked.
Other incidents include link-sharable Google Docs being public in actuality, trip data and addresses from Waze’s carpool feature being leaked, and holding on to deleted YouTube watch data. In most of these cases, the number of users affected was relatively small and the issues were fixed rather fast, but it is still a concerning amount of sloppiness from a company that has access to so much data.
A Big Part Of The Problem Is That Google Never Disclosed Some Of These Incidents To The Public
Look, the same way that downtime happens for even the biggest companies in the world is the same way that security vulnerabilities and breaches can happen. Here’s the big thing though: despite thousands of these incidents occurring, Google only publicly disclosed a few of them, and this leak is the first time most of them are being publicly reported.
Google might not have felt the need to say anything especially when the issues only touched a minuscule number of users, but it is still very concerning to users who had any degree of trust in Google to take care of their data to the best of its abilities.
Google has commented on the report, claiming that they “are from over six years ago” and each flagged incident was “reviewed and resolved at that time”. Hopefully, this will be a lesson to all of us that your data is never truly as safe as you want it to be, even with a technological behemoth such as Google.
