Google's Mistake Exposed Website Owners' Data
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but as a website owner you can choose to keep your information private. Or at least you thought you could because, as it turns out, an error in Google's software allowed the database to leak information, such as real names, addresses, emails and phone numbers for all the registered website owners, including the ones that were specifically trying to prevent that from happening. The funny thing (at least from afar) is that, as far as I'm concerned, the people who choose to keep their information private had to pay an extra fee to enjoy this benefit. I wonder if that option comes with a money back guarantee...
The error was discovered last month by Cisco’s Talos senior technical leader, Craig Williams, who quickly notified Google about the issue. Even if the IT giant fixed the problem in about six days time, the error seems to exist since mid 2013, so the damage has pretty much already been done. According to Cisco, approximately 230,000 domains were affected by the leak.
In case you are wondering what dangers such an unfortunate event poses to the regular user, the answer is simple: phishing scams. Generally, people who use phishing scams aren't dumb and use details that are as close to reality as possible, so it's not very easy to tell if the email/message you are receiving is "for real" or not. But now that they have access to the real names, real phone numbers, email addresses and phone numbers of the webmasters, it will be almost impossible to tell if what you receive is a phishing scam or not.
Google has yet to comment on the situation.
