Wait, so they only keep two weeks worth of logs and within these logs they did not find anyone abusing this flaw. How can they be certain for any time period from two week prior ?
The wording of this is really pushing the boundary of plausibility.
I fail to understand the logic of how this would protect privacy? Access logs with no profile data logged would not compromise privacy would it?
Can anyone confirm the timing of the google blog post? It seems the WSJ article was posted at a similar time.
This leads me to believe that the most likely reason we are hearing about this now is due to comment requests from the WSJ. WHEN Goog realised it was out they published.
Goog is trying to avoid using the words Data breach as they may get into hot water in EU.
Love how it is buried in the article.
My guess is a similar thing has been happening with android permissions. Data has been leaking through that they have just not admitted to it.
True, but access logs without profile data would prevent you know _which_ profiles were accessed. This matches with the actual claim in the article that they would be "unable to determine which users were affected"
I can see how that's private info, but would this be:
"client x viewed user 1234567's profile"
I am not a lawyer. You should hire an appropriately qualified lawyer to review your data hygiene practices.
The wording of this is really pushing the boundary of plausibility.
As far as GDPR goes technically this breach happened right before they would have faced large repercussions from it.
I'm not surprised. They (claim to) do something similar with the logs of their DNS service: two weeks of anonymized logs after which they "randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage".
Out of curiosity, when was this policy adopted? After these security holes were discovered?
If you don't have a good business case for keeping it, you're often better off erring on the side of deletion.
They had plenty of experience to suggest to them that keeping highly-detailed logs around indefinitely could do more harm to their users than good.
It doesn't sound like the logs are detailed enough to prove the antecedent, though, so it doesn't really matter if the logic is sound.