4 ms·
Be careful with those seemingly private 'share this report' links
Do a Google search for:
site:https://qualaroo.com/share/
and you'll see what I am about to get at. That's the tl;dr.
My bet is that most of the owners while aware that their share URLs were publicly accessible to those who have the link (> Qualaroo says explicitly that the URL is public <), they perhaps weren't intending for them to be easily accessible via Google.
As to whether this is a problem or not? It's a clear trade-off between convenience and privacy control and the answer may depend on the type of information being shared. While Qualaroo strips IP addresses and other identifying information, I do see some personally identifying information in those results (Qualaroo has no control over what its customers ask of their audience using Qualaroo, or over what responses are provided).
I believe vendors have a duty to their customers to provide them with control strong tools to protect their information.
As to how they ended up indexed by Google? Who knows - maybe they're getting better at indexing the Deep Web. Either way, the vendor should have robots.txt'd this from happening.
I hope this was at least mildly interesting to some and at best a warning to others!
- jmedwards 14y agoDoes Google's crawler 'discover' and index URLs shared in Google Mail, Gtalk? Thinking around ways in which these obscured links find their way into Google.