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Google Labs Fusion Table Search Exposes Private Phone Numbers, Account Numbers

6 points by rpiguy ↗ HN
Google Labs latest data visualization project is a Phisher's dream. I searched for "Video Game Sales" and got the sales plan of a business, presented to me in tabular format with client names, contact information, and was stunned.<p>I do not know if Google is collecting this from Google docs that are not marked as private, or if they are crawling the web to gather this data, or both. In either case the implications are far reaching.<p>After my initial disbelief, I decided to try searching for "Client List." This is a phisher's goldmine, some results even yielding tables with account numbers.<p>http://research.google.com/tables?corpus=fusion

2 comments

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Metatron
It just looks as if people have been storing their info insecurely. Sometimes people will only learn if they get burned.
trevin
The way Fusion Tables are set up can be pretty confusing. In order to embed your table somewhere, you have to make the Google Docs data behind it public & searchable. http://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/171221?hl=en

My guess is a lot of people are creating data visualizations for their own site/business and making the sets public without thinking of them being indexed and searchable. As I said, the documentation on this within Fusion Tables is pretty awful.