

Be careful with those seemingly private 'share this report' links - jmedwards

Do a Google search for:<p><pre><code>  site:https://qualaroo.com/share/
</code></pre>
and you'll see what I am about to get at. That's the tl;dr.<p>My bet is that most of the owners while aware that their share URLs were publicly accessible to those who have the link (&#62; Qualaroo says explicitly that the URL is public &#60;), they perhaps weren't intending for them to be easily accessible via Google.<p>As to whether this is a problem or not? It's a  clear trade-off between convenience and privacy control and the answer may depend on the type of information being shared. While Qualaroo strips IP addresses and other identifying information, I do see some personally identifying information in those results (Qualaroo has no control over what its customers ask of their audience using Qualaroo, or over what responses are provided).<p>I believe vendors have a duty to their customers to provide them with control  strong tools to protect their information.<p>As to how they ended up indexed by Google? Who knows - maybe they're getting better at indexing the Deep Web. Either way, the vendor should have robots.txt'd this from happening.<p>I hope this was at least mildly interesting to some and at best a warning to others!
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jmedwards
Does Google's crawler 'discover' and index URLs shared in Google Mail, Gtalk?
Thinking around ways in which these obscured links find their way into Google.

