Proving that information posted online is indelible and trivial to mine,
an academic researcher has dumped names, email addresses and biographical
information made available in 35 million Google Profiles into a massive
database that took just one month to assemble.
University of Amsterdam Ph.D. student Matthijs R. Koot said he compiled
the database as an experiment to see how easy it would be for private
detectives, spear phishers and others to mine the vast amount of personal
information stored in Google Profiles. The verdict: It wasn't hard at all.
Unlike Facebook policies that strictly forbid the practice, the
permissions file for the Google Profiles URL makes no prohibitions against
indexing the list.
What's more, Google engineers didn't impose any technical limitations in
accessing the data, which is made available in an extensible markup
language file called profiles-sitemap.xml. The code he used for the
data-mining proof of concept is available here.
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