I'm experiencing something that is obviously dumb users.<p>i have a first.last@gmail address and my name is very common. So i bet others had to use less desirable gmail addresses.<p>Since google started to aggressively push for adding alternative email and/or phone number, dumb users that initially wanted my email address entered it as their "alternate email" not understanding it's for password recovery only.<p>I clicked the "not me" link in more than 20 confirmation emails, but google probably never used that to better inform the dumb users.<p>Now my gmail account is a cesspool of emails intended for other people, site registration confirmation for idiots with same first/last name but a different middle name... And there's no spam algorithm that can fight that!<p>Time to start looking for alternatives.
tl;dr<p>A Norwegian girl, living abroad, enabled "auto upload my pictures to Google+" on her phone and for some reason they end up in a Norwegian IT journalists Google+. Everything from full passport details to regular photos are uploaded. The journalist can see Geo location etc as well. Google keep stating it is not possible and the journalist are experiencing problems contacting Google.
Just a warning: blurring pixels in sensitive photos like this is often insufficient. Always black out the information instead (and make sure to flatten the image! and not save it as e.g. a pdf with a black bar over it which has actually happened before too)<p><a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/how_to_recover.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/how_to_recover...</a>
I guess tech-journalists gets to try out quite a few mobile phones through their work.<p>Would it not be a reasonable scenario that the journalist got to try a phone and used the Google+ app with his account. Upon returning the phone, it wasn't reset properly before being sold on to another person. So the Google+ app could still be associated with the journalist's account when the phone was sold on.<p>Update: In this article(<a href="http://www.dagensit.no/tester/article2355417.ece" rel="nofollow">http://www.dagensit.no/tester/article2355417.ece</a>) the journalist reviews the Sony Xperia S, the very same phone model that the girl uses.
I am guessing there is a user Hash Collision.<p>Google uses hashes for a lot of things. Hash tables are very fast, and great for database look up. In Python if there is a hash collision both entries are compared and resolved by comparison. This is still fast because doing a compare against 4 collisions is still much faster than doing a compare against 1Billion user names.<p>That said... The odds get to be beyond astronomical. What percentage of people are journalists? I mean if they said someone contacted us to let us know, that would be believable, but "I am a journalist, and this is happening to me" seems a lot less likely.<p>I'm not ready to side with Google that this is impossible, but even the response from Google doesn't sound like the Google I know. While Google is hard to get a hold of for tech support and resolution of things, if you do get them to respond to a privacy concern they are swift.<p>With a Teen Girl they would be even swifter. One naked Bathroom pic and they are suddenly in the Child Porn distribution business, knowingly infringing (since they have been told now) on a teen with out her knowledge. That's the kind of thing that an employee goes to jail for, not just gets some big fines.
As much as I love bashing Google over privacy. And as highly probable as I believe the sort of glitch described is likely to occur, two things make me skeptical of this story.<p>A) That of all the random ways that a bug like this could manifest itself, it happened with a tech journalist on the receiving end.<p>B) That the author spoke with a live human Googler over a customer service issue in regard to a free service.<p>The real story here is B not A.
My wife had a problem with a girl creating a facebook account using a similar email to hers that somehow got her gmail account connected to that facebook account.<p>There was some account sharing going on, as the girl used that email address to login to her facebook account and all the FB notifications ended up in my wife's inbox.<p>At first I thought her account was compromised, but it was a secure password, so it seemed to be caused by the only slightly differing email addresses somehow being shared internally by gmail.<p>Only after activating 2-factor authentication did I manage to prevent that girl from using my wife's gmail account.
However, this was followed by a few weeks of constant gmail notifications about a detail/password change request sent to her phone.
"<i>The girl lives on another continent, so it is not just knocking on the door either.</i>"<p>from<p>"<i>Jenta bor på et annet kontinent, så det er ikke bare å banke på døren heller.</i>"<p>Can I assume that is mistranslated since the passport picture shows Norway which is the same country as the journalist?<p>Separately, DN.no seems to be a business tabloid, 8th largest, in Norway, according to Wikipedia (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagens_N%C3%A6ringsliv" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagens_N%C3%A6ringsliv</a>).
For the longest time, I used to receive someone else's e-mails on GMail. Our e-mail addresses were very similar except that mine had periods in it and his apparently didn't. Either that or he really loved signing me up for things.
Minor wording point: I think "sensitive" rather than "delicate" pictures is what's meant here, i.e. in the sense of "sensitive documents". (Sensitive/delicate overlap in some of their meanings, but not this one.)
" Whether you are trying to protect corporate intellectual property or just the privacy of your personal life, the key idea is that you shouldn't underestimate the importance of your disclosures, particularly over time. " [1]<p>[1] - Conti, Greg (2008-10-10). Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?
I'm glad to see a story like this getting some press as I've suspected that I've been dealing with something very similar for years now. Every so often I get an email from Facebook or some other service asking me to confirm a sign up I never made and under a different name, and then afterwards (where it gets strange) I get an email thanking me for confirming. Gmail says no other IPs have logged into my account and there's nothing in my sent folder related to it. I've changed passwords and it still happens. It's almost as if I share an email address with someone but they have a different "account".
slight mistranslation: "...sak som Google ikke kan forklare" means "...that Google can't explain", not "...that I can't explain". (my Norwegian isn't that good, but this kind of sticks out...)
Reason #12 why I will not use Google Glass or talk (beyond "hi" and "Yeah, nice weather") to one that has them on. I don't care how much they keep pushing them, they have their agenda, I have mine.<p>Stuff like this has the potential of ruining lives and relationships.