A new Google data leak has revealed numerous incidents involving privacy violations. This was reported by 404 Media, citing internal documentation from the tech giant.
The data obtained relates to privacy and security issues that Google employees reported internally. We are talking about thousands of messages from 2013 to 2018.
The incidents include problems with Google's own products or data collection practices, errors by company employees or contractors, etc.
According to media reports, when reporting an incident, Google employees assigned a priority rating to it, with P0 being the highest and P1 being one step lower.
For example, in one case in 2016, a Google employee reported that Google Street View systems decipher and store license plates from photos. Another incident involved the disclosure of more than a million email addresses of users of Socratic.org, a company acquired by Google.
In addition, the data mentions a case when the company's speech service recorded all audio, including the voices of about 1000 children, for an hour. The team deleted all recorded speech data for the relevant time period.
After 404 Media shared the identification codes of about 30 incidents with Google, the company reported that each of them had been resolved at the time.
“At Google employees can quickly flag potential product issues for review by the relevant teams. When an employee submits the flag they suggest the priority level to the reviewer," the company explained.
At the same time, the publication emphasizes that individual incidents, most of which have not been publicly reported before, could only affect a relatively small number of people or were quickly corrected.
Overall, however, the data shows how Google manages a huge amount of sensitive data about people's lives.