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Google secretly collecting data on users – media

Google news

Thousands of privacy infringements have been exposed in a leaked copy of an internal database, 404 Media has reported.

US tech giant Google has accidentally collected children’s voice data and leaked information on the trips and home addresses of car pool users, according to a report from 404 Media, citing a leaked copy of an internal database.

The report, published on Monday by the technology news website, said that the database contains thousands of privacy-related incidents over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018.

404 Media said it obtained the dataset from an anonymous source, and then verified the information. Google has confirmed aspects of its contents, it added.

The incidents reportedly include issues with Google’s own products and data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third-party vendors that Google uses; and mistakes made by staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data.

Most of the previously unreported incidents only impacted a small number of people or were quickly fixed, the report acknowledged.

“Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people’s lives,” 404 Media wrote.

In one case, a Google speech service recorded the voices of an estimated 1,000 children for about an hour. The team then “deleted all logged speech data from the affected time period,” the report reads.

Another incident involved Google’s Street View transcribing and storing license plate numbers from photos.

Google told 404 Media in a statement that “employees can quickly flag potential product issues for review by the relevant teams,” adding that the reports obtained by 404 are from six years ago and were reviewed and resolved at the time.

“In some cases, these employee flags turned out not to be issues at all or were issues that employees found in third party services,” Google said after 404 Media shared the identifying codes of around 30 incidents with the tech company.

Business Insider noted that the leak comes at a time when Google’s reliability “is already in question” after inaccurate responses from AI Overviews forced them to scale back the feature, the outlet wrote.

Image credit: Mitchell Luo

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Source:RT News

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Remember a few years ago when Google’s motto was, “don’t be evil”?

    Kinda makes sense now why they changed it.

  2. Mystery to me, why anyone still uses this company’s, so called services…..”do no evil”…..yeah, right……..

  3. Google is mostly about collecting data and selling it.

    They own, develop products, services and in the course of using those services, sell data to corporate, governments and private individuals.

    For example, an android phone is Google software.

    When you install software on any device, you are presented with pages and pages of legal agreement allowing disclosure. You never read or can’t understand them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

    https://theorg.com/iterate/what-companies-does-google-own

  4. It takes quite an effort to remove Google from your life. In some cases, it will make your life more cumbersome. Google is not the only corporation that records, tracks and sell your data. There are options, however some of those options are annoying or expensive and some are impractical.

    I don’t claim Apple phones are much better, but I do claim Android software is made by Google.

    A smartphone will track you when it is off. When you turn it back on, it will upload that tracking data.

    Both hardware and software work together to reveal, where you are, where you have been, who are your mates, what you read, what you type, what you say.

    100% Effective is don’t have any device or hang round people who do. That’s the impractical thing I mentioned earlier. Okay so that just leaves trimming down.

    Social media. You don’t have 1723 friends. You have a handful of close mates. Get rid of all social media. It’s tricky to cancel Farcebook. They tweak it several times a month to make it tricky and time consuming to delete. Check Themtube (Youtube) to find the latest long-winded process to delete it.

    Leave your phone at home when you go out. That’s the annoying thing. Don’t worry, you will get use to it.

    Don’t use a PC with a mic or camera. Just have one with a mic and or camera you plug in.

    Use Swisscows.com as your email and search engine.

    Use a VPN.

    Don’t click on any link you receive by email.

    Remember, all of the above are just cut-down measures.

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