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Online Search Engines Lift Cover Of Privacy
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Feb 09, 2004 09:18 PM
from the bathwater-around-the-baby dept.
from the bathwater-around-the-baby dept.
Rican writes "MSNBC has an interesting article about how 'Googledorks' are using the powerful search engine to do searches across the web for sensitive and/or private information. Some of this information includes 'Medical records, bank account numbers, students' grades, and the docking locations of 804 U.S. Navy ships, submarines and destroyers.'"
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Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's how it works. Let's say you put a page on your site called
http://yoursite.com/temporary/hidden/dontreadth
And it is not linked to ever.
If you send that URL to someone using Opera with the right settings (but you don't know that) and they read the private document, within minutes GOOGLE WILL CRAWL THAT DOCUMENT!
Nothing is private any more under situations like that. Let's say that private document then links to all your older private documents. Google can then freely crawl it's way in to read the rest.
Who's to blame for this then? not you. You've already ensured you hadn't linked to it. Not the opera user, as they have read the document, and respecting your privacy they've not mentioned it to anyone else
However underhanded tactics like sneaking in a google crawl in this manner is unacceptable to me. My firewall blocks all google crawler bots for this very reason
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Fuck that shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if the robots.txt file prevents you from accessing that data, which it does.
The robots.txt file prevents nothing. It's merely a request that the spider "not go here." It's not a lock on the door. It's a sign that says, "please do not enter my house."
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Re:Fuck that shit (Score:5, Funny)
The safe, however, should be locked.
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
.htaccess anyone?
That, along with an appropriate robots.txt file should be all you would need to prevent a crawl, right?
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, if you think writing "htttp" with three t:s and put a space in the URL is gonna stop people from finding that document, you're pretty behind to tell you the truth.
I do wonder, however, how YOU knew the location of locationsOfAllAgentsInTheWorld.xls? That's supposed to be a secret!
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
http://yoursite.com/temporary/hidden/dontreadth
And it is not linked to ever.
I realize this is redundant, and you were likely trolling, but Google will leave you right the fuck alone, so long as you put another little file at:
http://yoursite.com/robots.txt
That contains the text:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
I realize this is opt-out rather than opt-in, but there's just one place you have to opt, and there isn't another way that Google could possibly do their job. Everybody else seems to understand that the internet is a publicly accessible network.
So who's to blame? You. You put a sensitive document in a publicly accessible location on the internet, and took no precautions to keep it secure. Not linking to it is not a precaution.
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Re:wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
<snip>
And it is not linked to ever.
Then you have still put it in a publically accessible place, and bear full blame for others finding it.
For a physical-world analogy, let's say that you want to give a note to a friend (which, for some reason, requires a non-conventional mode of delivery). You could leave it at page 416 of "The complete minutes of the Town of Dullsville, 1853 to 1862", which no one had checked out in the past 30 years. Tell your friend where to find it, and 999 times out of 1000, you'd have no problems.
If you one day used that same method of sending a note, only to discover someone checked out the book and removed the note, would you actually have the gall to blame anyone but yourself?
Slashdotters, of all people, have heard this over and over and over... Security through obscurity may help in addition to some form of "real" security, but it almost never works by itself. The web counts as a very public place. If you place sensitive information on it with no security beyond a "hidden" URL, don't act surprised when the NYT has it as a headline the next week.
And for reference, yeah, I too have stuck random files up on my site for a friend to grab. But never when it would have mattered if someone else randomly found those files.
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Get a clue (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Uh-huh. (Score:5, Informative)
> existance of that page get from Opera to Google such that it
> could pin-point (not crawl) that page?
Opera submits URLs browsed to by users, to google, when advert support is turned on.
http://www.opera.com/adsupport/ [opera.com]
From that page:
--------
What is the connection between the Web page and the relevant ad displayed by Google?
Opera's interaction with the Google ad system:
The Opera browser sends Google the URL of the web page you are visiting and your IP address (with the exceptions Opera filters out -- see below)
--------
Exceptions are https, forms, passwords, cgi, and non-http URLs.
As an example from my apache log file last night, when I gave a friend a URL to a photo:It's surprising how many Opera users will deny this happens, despite the evidence. That's a 5 minute delay, google is pretty quick with its crawling. Personally, I don't mind. I put things up in my temporary directory and pull them down fairly soon after. I know nothing is secure if it's just an unprotected URL, so I'm not worried like the grandparent poster. However, Opera does send URLs to google, and google does come back and check them out.
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Re:Enough of the bullshit! (Score:5, Informative)
Opera's interaction with the Google ad system:
visiting and your IP address (with the exceptions Opera filters
out -- see below)
IP address, to better target the ads
is on that page
and the Web page accessed
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Re:Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
i think that this is somewhat an issues of bad management and somewhat (maybe more) and issue of the weakness of web service security (compared to something like local novell services).
eric
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Kazaa and Gnutella are cooler (Score:5, Interesting)
It's surprising what people will sit in their kazaa upload directory, using it like a documents dump. Legal papers, company's employee policy documents, employee records, sensitive stuff, medical records.
Taken straight from people's HDs, no hacking, cracking or other media-unfriendly terms needed, just the ignorance of the people who leave this stuff open is needed.
Re:Kazaa and Gnutella are cooler (Score:5, Informative)
Other examples are ".dbx", the file name extension for mail folders in Outlook Express. Or ".pwl", the Windows 9x system password file (supposedly easily crackable with the correct tool).
There are unfortunately clueless users who share their whole hard drive. File sharing programs have however started getting better in discouraging or preventing the users from doing this.
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What I like (Score:5, Informative)
What I like to do is go on gnutella or kazaa and search for "DSN" or one of a number of similar prefixes. Why? Because most digital cameras save their files in a specific hardwired format, and the kind of people who leave their entire hard drive shared on kazaa are the kind of people who don't rename their digital cameras.
You can find the most random, interesting, occationally personal shit that way.
I'm trying to remember the other common prefixes besides DSN and failing.
-- Super ugly ultraman
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Re:What I like (Score:5, Interesting)
Click on the "show me some pictures" button at the upper-right.
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Cover of "Privacy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cover of "Privacy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps a more accurate title would have been "Online Search Engines Remove Delusion Of Privacy."
Cheers,
IT
Parent
I've heard of "cow orkers"... (Score:5, Funny)
...but what the heck are "googled orks"?
Re:I've heard of "cow orkers"... (Score:5, Insightful)
How come Homer and Krusty look like clones?
It's intentional. MG originally intended it to be a joke; Bart didn't respect his dad, but he worshiped a clown who looked exactly like his dad. He mentioned this on an NPR interview last week.
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Why Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
The same as a metal detector or store directory leaflet - these are tools used for information retrieval.
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Re:Why Google? (Score:5, Informative)
2) This is an article from MSN. This information was available long before Google, but it is, at the very least, curious to see this sort of article from Microsoft when they have been going to the press lately about how Microsoft intends to develop their own search technology...
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There's good stuff out there not on Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why Google never indexes this stuff, it's clearly public record and can be of interest to a lot of people, but they never did (I checked them many times, including just now, and they show no indication of the document). I wonder what other good government documents are out there if you only know where to look for them.
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SS Minnow (Score:5, Funny)
The worst example.. (Score:5, Informative)
You can do this on KaZaA too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, I found a text file with all the user names and passwords for brokerage firms, and bank accounts, of the IT director at the firm I was working in. Scary, considering he was supposed to have "15 years in the IT industry".
Could happen to you (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back I Googled my credit card number for a laugh. I was shocked to find it in an indexed webserver log for a site I had previously 'tried' to purchase from. (the form timed-out and I gave up).
A quick call to the bank and a few angry calls to the company sorted it, but I was not impressed.
Perhaps a tool to search for ones own private details should be developed to keep an eye on this?
Re:Could happen to you (Score:5, Interesting)
You say you typed your CC# into Google. Unless I missed something, this means that...
1. It was transmitted over an unsecure connection
2. It may have been logged as part of regular access logs
and for the paranoid
3. It may have been logged specifically as a potential CC# at Google (either due to the company having such a dubious programme, or a rogue employee / group of employees).
For all you know now, if you searched Yahoo in the future (for whatever reason), your search query with Google may pop up
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Re:Could happen to you (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if google has a feature where I can view recent search terms...? You had a laugh, I get a giggle, we're all having fun!
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Cue Dr. Evil (Score:5, Funny)
Hard to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
web servers for morons (Score:5, Insightful)
The real story here is that companies and other organizations and institutions are setting machines up as servers and are too stupid to create an appropriate robots.txt file and/or keep their confidential information elsewhere. Google doesn't just drop in, even on networked machines. I have some sympathy for individuals who don't understand what they are doing when they make their machine a server, but surely any professional sysadmin, even one with limited training and experience, should know better than this. It's the same as leaving your briefcase on the front seat of an unlocked car.
so who owns it, how can we stop it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of this problem comes out of who owns the daggoned data. For example, let's say a hospital, instead of using clipboards, uses smartcards to hocket about patient records.
Who own's the data. The hospital, the insurance company paying the bill, or the poor schmuck on the business end of a colonoscopy?
I ask because without the indiviual having the write to own the data, there seems to me little that can be done to protect oneself other than go through expensive and tedious legal channels.
And if someone else can own sensitive data about me, then what can we do, as private citizens with limited resources, to make sure larger entities such as insurance companies play by rules like HIPPA?
Geez (Score:5, Insightful)
Peeps nowadays...
nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
Err, not me of course ;-)
docking locations of 804 ships? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, these are not precise locations. Yeah, you can find that the USS Roosevelt (DDG-80) is homeported in Mayport, Florida but you're not going to find the precise pier number.
As for ships on deployment, one can find their general locations just by looking at the latest issue of the Navy Times and by reading the newspaper of the town that the ship and its battlegroup are from.
The Navy really tightened up on what get's posted on official ship's websites after 9/11. If there is sensitive information still out there, Google is not at fault, but rather the unit's webmaster, Commanding Officer, and the Operational Security people who are supposed to be looking out for that sort of thing.
Google can't always hack it (Score:5, Interesting)
old skool trick (Score:5, Insightful)
"http://*:*@" member
and you would get a bunch of sites with direct links into passworded member sites. Microsoft will put a stop to this with their latest update to IE however.
Tin Foil people, please observe (Score:5, Funny)
Just gotta watch out for the honey pots (Score:5, Interesting)
They have some Webalizer stats [gray-world.net] for the honey pot too.
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't some hardened criminal mastermind at work. It's not a seasoned cracker attacking military targets. This isn't even some script kiddie poking at IIS. It's a MACHINE. A machine that respects robots.txt for Eris' sake!
If medical records and other "real" secrets are this visible, something is terribly wrong and I want to see public floggings. Seriously, this is not a case of weak security, or poor security, or incompetent security. It's a case of there not being so much as a screen door between the public and sensitive information.
This is actually a case where I think the government (or at least the courts) can do some good. You'll notice banks don't get hacked on a daily basis. That's because they'd lose squintillions of dollars if it happened. But nobody cares about my medical records because it costs money not to have incompetent asses running things. On the other hand, if revealing to without were punishible by a $1000 fine per person, per offense, you'd notice a severe tightening of security in a mighty big hurry.
It's a shame that suing people is sometimes the only way to get their attention, but with the decline of basic civil responsibility it might be inevitable.
Re:Google threatens privacy and national security (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they should not. They are not in a position to know what _is_ sensitive - and to whom. They can reasonably only assume that anything reachable with an ordinary, polite spider is meant to be accessible to the world at large. If you feel certain information should not be made accessible, bring it up with those actually making it accessible, not with those just indexing it once it is.
Shooting the messenger is not just pointless, it is counterproductive.
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Re:Google threatens privacy and national security (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nothings private (Score:5, Insightful)
And on a totally unrelated thought. . .
Is Yuki Noguchi on crack? Google does not do anything to privacy. All Google does is make it easier to find publicly available information. Maybe "Online search engines act as a catalyst to find private information" would be more a accurate title. ". .Parent