Google Voice Messages Searchable by Anyone

Some Google Voice users have voicemails available for the public to see on Google

While Google is bathing in the glory of this past weekend's big Motorola DROID reveal (via Verizon), the search-engine mammoth may now be facing a spotlight of a different sort. Currently many consumers using Google Voice are discovering that their seemingly private voicemail messages are now indexed and made publicly available on Google.

To see this big revelation in action, simply enter "site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*" into the search box, but without the quotes. This will pull up several page results that include test messages supplied by Google as well as random, legitimate voicemails by Google Voice users... including their phone numbers. The message dates are just as random, ranging from around July to just a few days ago.

Is this a breach of privacy? Not if they're publicly posted or shared online according to Google. "Since the initial idea behind posting a voicemail, was precisely to share it with others, we did not restrict crawling of those messages that users post on the web, but we can certainly understand that users would want to make them public on their sites but not necessarily searchable directly outside of their own website," writes a Google rep here. "We made a change to prevent those to be crawled so only the site owner can decide to index them."

Perhaps many Google Voice users will now reconsider how important it is to review their share or publish settings, especially if phone numbers are attached to the search results.