Security/Privacy Hole in Google Presentations Closed
Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle (part of the Blog News Channel) made an interesting post about a security hole (privacy hole) in Google Presentations that Google closed. In brief, Google revealed to the web site owners the email addresses of registered Google users who viewed an embedded presentation. The emails were revealed in the site logs.
Presentation is part of the “Office Standard Edition” that Carsten blogged about yesterday. Interestingly, he quoted someone else who wrote the “presentation tool lacks … the facility to embed presentations on blogs and sites.” I imagine the two issues may be related?
I’m not into the whole Google docs thing and don’t anticipate that I will be but the issue piqued my interest for its privacy issues. Many people would agree that if Google has an Achilles heel, it’s privacy concerns.
At the Performics conference the keynote speaker Stephen D Levitt told of his experience with Google and privacy. Someone (presumably Dr. Levitt) had the idea to identify health epidemics as they were breaking based on search queries from a geographical area. Sounds like a good idea, but it went nowhere. When Levitt followed up with Google his contact said, ‘Stephen, every day millions of children wake up thinking that Google will protect their privacy. We don’t want to change that.’ (This is paraphrased but pretty close to what I remember.)
Even before he hit his punchline – “I’m not sure those millions of children exist” – more than a few chuckles spilled out of the crowd. People understand Google’s concern with privacy and the company’s reputation for highfalutin rhetoric.
I don’t imagine this minor hiccup will be widely remembered but it should serve as a reminder that no company is infallible with data security, even one that stakes as much value in it as Google does.
