Bas van den Beld reports:
Aren’t they lovely, the new Google Profiles? And you can put so much information in it. Information which everybody can see. And download… We’ve discussed the privacy matters around the profiles before and I will be talking about the presentation I did at SMX about the profiles soon too. But there is a lot more to the Google Profiles. A Dutch researcher was able to download, export and import 35 million Google Profiles, with data.
The researcher Matthijs Koot, working for the University of Amsterdam, is writing a research paper about anonymity and privacy. For that research he decided to look at the Google Profiles. He noted that a lot of the information can be downloaded pretty easy.
Last February Koot created “a database containing ALL ~35.000.000 Google Profiles without Google throttling, blocking, CAPTCHAing or otherwise make more difficult mass-downloading attempts.”
Read more on State of Search.