This was buzzed by Google’s Matt Cutt’s in response to suggestions that Google had only managed to gather the email addresses by using some sort of underhand, insider methods. But personal email addresses are visible using Yahoo too.
From Matt Cutt’s Buzz;
http://allfacebook.com/2010/06/facebook-loophole-exposes-thousands-of-email-addresses/ makes a false claim: “The other question that this raises is how did Google get access to this page? Was it found it users’ gmail accounts? The only way they could have possibly found the link was by automatically following links found in users’ emails which were intended to be private.”
Uh, no. We found those pages by crawling normal links on public web pages. It also would have been nice if the author of that blog post had asked us before claiming that the “only way” Google could have possibly found pages was by following links in emails. We could have saved him the trouble of making up a new conspiracy theory.
In fact, here’s how you can debunk that idea without even talking to Google: run the same search [site:facebook.com “do you want to stop receiving facebook emails”] on Yahoo. Yes, Yahoo–they run a search engine too.
Yahoo also found pages with email addresses. In fact, I see at least one gmail.com email address on Yahoo’s first page. Did Yahoo discover the link to that page by crawling a user’s Gmail? Obviously not. Therefore Yahoo must have discovered the link from normal means, e.g. seeing a link to it on the public web. Once you’ve demonstrated that Yahoo found the link via public means, why invent the conspiracy theory that Google found the link via Gmail? Occam’s Razor and all that.
Interestingly the Yahoo search no longer reveals anything of interest, so Yahoo have also followed Google in removing these pages from their listings to protect users privacy.
The latest on this seems to be that it was not Facebook at fault but its users who shared their private information and then were shocked to discover it was visibile to others online. The reason: “turns out the users forwarded their facebook mails to public mailing lists, including the unsubscribe links.” So, just some daft people not checking what they send in an email!
There is probably a lot more to it, but I cannot be bothered to dig any deeper. The main search engines have tied up the mess, Ask.com is in the process if doing it I guess (had not when last checked). Put security first, do not share your private information online.
