Google is spying on all our journals

[purpletigron]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiralsheep/7207.html

Edit Google is fixing things and of the locked posts which are indexed, it may only be ones which were once unlocked.

BTW: Make sure that your journal style blocks robots by doing 'view source' on your own Journal and looking for the 'robots' meta-tag.

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I've just tried searching on text from my LJ entries.

Google found all of the unlocked posts.

Google found none of the locked posts.

Ditto for some friends' journals I tried.

Has anyone got a verifiable example of a friends-locked post that Google is indexing?

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

spiralsheep seems to.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

spriralsheep claims this is the case, refuses to give examples and seems to be getting snarky with anyone who asks for more details.

That Google (or any agency outside LJ) can break LJ security and read friends-locked posts is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we're not being shown any evidence.

[handslive.livejournal.com]

Personally, I can to some extent understand this reaction. Giving out examples is roughly equivalent to widely broadcasting private or at least potentially sensitive information to a wide audience. Whether the example is from spiralsheep's own LJ or a friend's, I doubt the poster in question would be thankful for the additional attention.

For myself, as I've posted further down, I believe it's possible for it to happen in some circumstances if (a) the poster submits a public entry and then locks it and (b) Google is using the RSS feed or simply hits the race condition on locking the entry. Either way, it's possible to leak information unintentionally.

Equally bad is that this would be a user training issue. User training almost never works, so I would expect to see future and more dramatic examples of this leak once BlogSearch is in common use.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Post here summarising my understanding of problem and possible solutions.

[handslive.livejournal.com]

I read your post and I have a couple of thoughts about the indexed locked entries. I also searched through my entries and found no locked entries in a cursory glance at the four pages of results. I wonder if some of these other entries were posted as public and then locked.

For myself, if I want to post a draft entry and edit it, I either post it at the level of restriction I want or at private and then loosen the restrictions. I never post the other way and try to tighten the restrictions afterward.

Note that the RSS feed would definitely pick up locked posts this way.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I'm irritated about two things regarding this:

1. I can't turn off my LJ's RSS feed so it won't be caught by the blogsearch.

2. It catches LJs that have "block robots and spiders" turned on (like mine does).

I checked to see if it would catch stuff that's been f-locked from the start, and it doesn't.