October 19, 2009, 4:44 PM — A technology blog site today reported that it had discovered an apparent Google Voice flaw that allows some voicemail messages left on the hosted service to be accessible via a Google search. The blog post by Nilay Patel on Engadget.com reported said that several pages of transcribed Google Voice voicemail messages had been retrieved by inputting the string site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/* into Google's search engine.
Many of the messages appeared to be test voicemail messages sent by Google personnel, Engadget said. However, the post reported that a "couple of eye-popping" messages were also retrieved.
"We're not exactly sure what's going on here, but it certainly seems like at least some Google Voice voicemails are being indexed and made publicly available somehow," the blog post said. Engadget said it had retrieved voicemail messages left during a period from some months ago until yesterday. "Clearly an ongoing issue -- hopefully Google patches this up awful fast," the story said.
A check this afternoon by Computerworld using the search string cited in the Engadget post article returned three pages containing 38 transcribed voicemail messages. Most of the messages retrieved by Computerworld appeared to be test messages, though it wasn't clear whether all were created from within Google.
In a statement, Google acknowedged that some voicemail messages are searchable, and that it is making changes to prevent that from happening.
"Since the initial idea behind posting a voicemail was precisely to share it with others, previously we did not restrict crawling of voicemail messages users posted on the web," Google said in the statement. "However, we can certainly understand people would want to make their voicemails public on their own sites, but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website. We made a change to prevent these voicemails from being crawled so their content will not be indexed."
