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up vote 6 down vote favorite

I feel like there's no real need for this sort of information to be available to everyone:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-7000.txt

Since Google hosts gstatic.com, I feel like they should have the knowhow to not allow this information to be available. Also, if you change the 7000 number from anywhere in the 1000s to 7000s, it seems to give you another list of 5000 fresh profiles.

Why on earth would Google make this information publicly available? As a Google+ member, is there reason to be concerned?

Thanks in advance.

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1  
So these are lists of profiles? What private information is being revealed? If it truly is a concern, then I'd suggest filing a complaint directly with Google's privacy department (assuming they have one -- they very likely do) to get it resolved. – Randolf Richardson Jul 6 '11 at 7:45
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I don't this it is a problem. Those profiles are public profiles – Nicu Zecheru Jul 6 '11 at 8:07
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Private Google Profiles are going away at the end of the month in any event. Only public profiles will be allowed going forward. – Al Everett Jul 6 '11 at 13:21

migrated from superuser.com Jul 6 '11 at 8:26

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

No, it should not constitute a major privacy risk. Even if I find your profile from such a list, I will still only be able to see the information on your profile that would have been visible to the general public anyhow (either by your own choice or because google+ has declared that it is required to be public).

As for why such a list exists, it's common for sites to publish "sitemaps" which are intended for machine consumption and contain a list of all public URIs on the site so that search engines can easily index the site's (public) content and make it available to appear in search results. Given that this URL points to a resource in a "sitemaps" directory, it seems extremely likely that that's what it is.

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up vote 2 down vote

It's a list of numbers - there is nothing there which is personally identifiable information, sensitive information, corporate or business information.

It's not actually posting profile information, as the profile numbers themselves are public and not sensitive.

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up vote 0 down vote

Well it is new (as of mid 2011). So with any new service there is risk of security holes, even with Google. Or especially with Google since it is a big juicy target for information thieves.

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