Some Google news simmered over the weekend and finally boiled over today in a froth of overstatement. A county school district in North Carolina came to legal blows with the engine over indexing the names, social security numbers and test scores of over 600 students, in the form of a temporary injunction to remove the information.
Although one early source ran a headline that implied the Catawba County Schools were accusing Google of “hacking” into a secure server (which is almost like saying Google rode off on somebody’s bike), the whole incident actually seems to stem from a relatively boring customer service tiff – and the misused word “hacking” seems to have caused much of the ruckus that followed.
The fuss started when Catawba County School documents thought to be protected by passwords – and which were stored on the same server as publicly accessible info – were somehow spidered by Google. The school district tried the usual channels to get the info removed from Google’s index and cache, but met with no success. Judith Ray, Catawba County Schools’ CTO, explains to Danny Sullivan:
“We could not get operators to connect us with technical support, the legal department, or to anyone higher up in the organization. We were only given an email address to which we could submit a complaint – which we did but got no response. Google has a link to submit an emergency request but on both Thursday and Friday of last week, the link took you to a dead page. Only when the news media submitted its own inquiry to Google did we get a call regarding the situation. And [Google] has been most helpful in working through this situation with us.”
Looks like all’s well that ends well, but the question remains as to how Google managed to access the allegedly secure documents to begin with. Ray admits that no one currently employed by the district’s tech department was around when the server in question was first brought on line, so they’re checking it to make sure it was set up correctly. As for Google’s part in all this, maybe it’d behoove them to be a bit quicker on the uptake when it comes to resolving customer complaints.
I know Google is the tech darling for most people, but they’ve been taking a PR hit recently. The whole China censorship thing, the claims that a site was able to get a billion or so subdomains indexed, and now this.
People have been asking for more details on “pages dropping from the index” so I thought I’d write down a brain dump of everything I knew about, to have it all in one place. Bear in mind that this is my best recollection, so I’m not claiming that it’s perfect.
The Black Rock Desert is a dry lake bed in northwestern Nevada in the United States. Considered one of the flattest surfaces on the earth, the desert is part of the extended playa of the lake bed of prehistoric Lake Lahontan, which existed between 20,000 and 9,000 years ago during the last ice age. During the lake’s peak around 12,700 years ago, the desert floor was under approximately 500 feet (150m) of water.