The leaked information, sent by an anonymous source to 404 Media, covers incidents that were reported by employees between six and nine years ago, a Google spokesperson confirmed.
In brief: Google has made privacy mistakes in the past that were made public, but what about those we don’t know about? A leaked internal database from the company has revealed thousands of privacy and security failings that Google flagged between 2013 and 2018, some of which are quite damning.
The leaked information, sent by an anonymous source to 404 Media, covers incidents that were reported by employees between six and nine years ago, a Google spokesperson confirmed.
The publication writes that, taken individually, most of the cases only impacted a relatively small number of people or were fixed quickly, but “taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people’s lives.”
A case from 2016 saw a Google employee report that Google Street View’s systems were accidentally transcribing and storing license plate numbers from photos, unintentionally creating a database of geolocated plate numbers.
