Google Voice voicemails appearing in public search results

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. If you punch in "site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*" as a search string you get a few pages of what appear to be test messages, with a couple eye-opening obvious non-tests scattered in there as well. Dates on these messages range from a couple months ago all the way until yesterday, so this is clearly an ongoing issue -- hopefully Google patches this up awful fast.

P.S. - Google Voice transcription accuracy really falls off a cliff when it's listening to muffled audio, doesn't it?

Update: Google says it's changed how shared messages are indexed and made available to public searches, so we're hoping this was just a one-time thing.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:27AM]

From the makers of android.
We now publish your voicemails publicly.
Even android fanboys don't know what to say.

[TikiTeko Posted Oct 19th 2009 1:09PM]

I ... I actually confess.... My android flame has been put out by this........................ :'(

[NinjaTaco Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:30AM]

I wonder how many phonecalls from lonely nerds that poor "Kim Sexy" will get today...

https://www.google.com/voice/fm/15240755035675860506/AHwOX_C5TD2m-HkHSI10zYhZ8W8vuslys4OzaKmsCgG_pbmSwqypU9az3ImLlkTdwO828v9ttzigFsFSmzdVTDcCTH3VVqyWdvHKxyK_8z7i5OMkYibVwSbzyI9BsMKbQ7XSoh8lQ7e1muc-cBy10e6mskfrWaoq4w

[fLim Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:33AM]

https://www.google.com/voice/fm/13418109598078281795/AHwOX_DM4yfetGW8mgEnkg6i6IcNLMI5F4PdiGRy24_c5PTJJC4WgpU_ONO6oK3Y49MXPnOnFx8W-Yh0EhyJQkkTtgaBmb7NB7b5_zalVf2h4TRrdxXNgUxP5gZQIVusRzW7ncco63I-2FFYqyvEX-TfCMsCaZqG9g

Well done!
Sweet!

[NewL Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:36AM]

Why would anybody want to make his/her voice mail messages public in the first place? I can't think of a single reason to do that.

[O Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:46AM]

For the same reason people make pictures of their drunken romps public on myspace, facebook, twitter, etc.

Everything they do is so awesome that it is a crime to keep others from enjoying their awesomeness!

[Andir Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:48AM]

I've received a few hilarious voicemails from people that drunk dialed the wrong number...

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 12:14PM]

Fortunately most of my Google Voice messages are from people with heavy accents, so the transcripts are complete nonsense.

[barry99705 Posted Oct 19th 2009 12:46PM]

There is a button to turn off that feature.

[paw1 Posted Oct 19th 2009 12:27PM]

^^ plz send an invite :) [e-mail]

[John Doe Posted Oct 19th 2009 12:29PM]

Oh and if you are uber paranoid you can turn off the transcribe option as well. Issue resolved. But this isn't an issue. It was a mistake by someone that got resolved.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 20th 2009 1:43PM]

these people published they voicemails... last time i checked what does publish mean?

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 12:54PM]

Having Google search publicly posted voicemails / transcriptions seems pretty reasonable, and with the recent change to require the site owner to explicitly enable indexing of that type of content (at least for Google, probably won't matter for Yahoo / Bing / other searches) it would seem that there are no reasonable objections.

However, there remain two unanswered questions:

1) How difficult to predict are the URLs for these voicemails, and are they accessible to other users if they have not been explicitly "shared" in some way? (I haven't seen anything in the Google Voice settings that talks about sharing or making voicemails public - perhaps this is in the display for a single voicemail?)

2) When/if a voicemail is "deleted" are any previous URLs to the content actually invalidated? (index cache of course may remain for quite some further time)

It is unlikely that anyone outside Google/Grand Central could really speak with any authority to the first question, although some experimentation is possible. The second question should be reasonably easy to answer, but as I have already deleted all my voicemails, would require more work than I really want to put in on this issue.

@alex

[Ned Scott Posted Oct 19th 2009 2:07PM]

I don't think people here understand. ALL messages are public/accessible by anyone. Google thinks it's okay because it doesn't index them unless the link is posed on a website that gets indexed.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 2:14PM]

The voicemails are protected by having a huge string of letters and numbers in their URL.

Though truth be told, any and all voicemails on the system can be found by merely brute forcing it.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 2:32PM]

The coolest set of voicemails is from a Christian missionary doing work in Mali. Look for numbers that start with +88.

[Nblufire12 Posted Oct 19th 2009 2:33PM]

omg this is not good lmfao

i use google voice a lot

[Gi Posted Oct 19th 2009 2:40PM]

bahahaha

[matthew2 Posted Oct 19th 2009 3:58PM]

Uh... what is this stuff about "sharing"? I have google voice and I see no setting related to "sharing" a message. I'm assuming that all are unshared by default, but I sure want to make sure. I have checked everywhere I can find and I see nothing about sharing.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 4:28PM]

check out http://www.googlevoicemails.com - it's a collection of voicemails

[Maxthedog Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:16PM]

Well if your friends have no teeth and slur every word, yeah, it'll be a crappy transcription. I'm actually suprised how good it has worked for me so far. If you have a brain at all and know the general topic someone is talking about you can pretty much figure out exactly what they're saying.

[simbr Posted Oct 19th 2009 8:38PM]

I love the "Go go [gadget] voice mail" and "private invoice barney system" in the top search result.

[mrrross Posted Oct 19th 2009 9:28PM]

I contacted someone whose voicemail was on listed in my search. He was not pleased as it covered his business...

[Eman Posted Oct 20th 2009 12:39AM]

https://www.google.com/voice/fm/06974281305002571178/AHwOX_Ag2RPpE-DKpodoDR70FvHiWThgLIwDsNROITF1Yw3bqTTWVxSiQi6Qdnd8YHhSLThzSc8Xhm3FCwJBwXcbZQGcHItjsJldHsANl_80h2LVLAmPALkn9yTyi9-hlTPW4xLJ_sL3Q0loLv9fyM5A_edBzkwmMA

[ArbitrageMan Posted Oct 20th 2009 9:35AM]

Everyones been so cool with letting google store all their personal information, all their emails, all their phone calls, all their voice mails, their latitude location, and the comment I always heard was, nothings going to go wrong, don't be so paranoid. Well, heres example 1 of 483,487 ways all your private information *will* end up on the internet.

I love google's stuff, but I wouldn't dream of storing anything I didn't want the world knowing on their servers.

[Justin Goldbegr Posted Oct 20th 2009 2:36PM]

They're in Bing too. Great seo comparison between which search engines crawl what's behind robots.txt. Or did google just update their index manually and the other search engines merely haven't updated their entire index yet?

There's definitely a value behind indexing content blocked in robots.txt