Google Blamed Over Privacy Issues Again….
:eyebrow: This time the Google’s free web accelerator has turned on the privacy and security alarms.
Web Accelerator that is meant to load webpages faster by serving up cached copies of sites from Google’s servers can serve the cached copies of private discussion groups or password-protected pages to its users.:tdown:
When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. (Source…) :tdown:
So I guess Google can collect various passwords like yahoo mail passwords, forum passwords etc… because they are not running on SSL (HTTPS).
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Web products, said the company is working on a fix but downplayed the threat. “It looks worse than it is,” she said. “We’ve cached the page with that user name on it. But you are not actually signed in; you couldn’t operate as that person,” she said, adding it has affected only a small number of sites.
I still remember the last time Google was blamed for security flaws in its free e-mail service Gmail and then Google’s desktop search software, contained a security glitch that temporarily exposed private data on the Web. :boxed:
This time I’ll wait until a proper security fix to be released. 
8 Comments so far
Please leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Looks like you don’t understand the concept. Are you familiar with Google’s Cached Pages feature? When you search with Google, you also get a link called “Cached” with every listing. That shows you the page that Google Bot saw when it last visited that URL. It can be your Yahoo! Mail page but its just plain HTML, you can’t use that to login to your Yahoo! account. Sure it shows you the username on the page but what the hell? It doesn’t show your password, so how is it insecure??
The web accelerator is based on that same concept. It grabs the HTML, just as your browser would, from the server & stores it on its own server. Then when you request it, its presented to you instantaneously. So you see what you would’ve seen when you’d visited the page without Google’s Web Accelerator!! It doesn’t compromise your mail accounts, forum logins etc. in any way. The concept is quite simple, its just like a web-based proxy, which also grabs the HTML from the server & displays it to you from its own server.
If you want, I can show you a live example.
Man, now i got what ur tryin to say…
Google Web Accelerator is not a problem.The actual issue is the google cache which is there from always and has got no such complaints.
I recently tried my hand over google to find if it will have any effect or not.
I guess, i have found a cached forum page.. which google has cached when the user “Bots” is logged in.But this all works on cookies so no effect when u try to go ahead like reading messages etc.
Yes, that’s what Google has been trying to explain but some people get uptight about things they don’t even know half about that it just worsens the situation as because of them false information starts spreading which is more harmful than anything else Google comes up with.
Dont blame individual users buddyy…..The media companies are worsening the situation.I guess even CNET News has criticied it on their website.
By saying
I meant to cover the media companies as well, there are living people like you & me there also, who write these reports/articles/news stories, no?
All your fears will come true when you read this article. This is not written by any media company, but it is my first hand experience.
Read this article http://anishsood.weblogs.us/archives/22
Do let me know what you think about it.
Buddy ur website is not opening for some reasons.
Also if one user can gain acess to control panel of other user then the flaw is in the website.
The google cache is not a problem and it was there from always.If u go against the cache means u r going against the google search system and even yahoo,msn all are indexing pages.
U know search cannot work without cache, They have to cache pages to search for keywords and stuff.
Any other doubts ??? post here.
My website is perfectly fine, just read the article and you will understand.
GWA is having problems like this for all websites containing user-specific data.