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Your Toutapp Private Data in Google’s Index

Published on January 30th, 2012
Written by: Douglas Karr
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UPDATE: Within an hour of my email being sent to Toutapp, they removed my report and account. I would still like to see them block their site from search engine traffic and bots. SPAM bots don’t care about robots.txt files, so this is still a poor practice of publishing this information freely. ToutApp should require a login to see private information.

A few minutes ago, I just had a business partner contact me that when they searched their name on Google, a report from Toutapp appeared in the results. Sure enough, I tested it and there was the report in all its glory! This particular business partner’s industry is severely restricted by regulations. The fact that his name could be associated with our business could raise questions and, now, impact whether or not we continue to do business with them.

I didn’t expect this. When I read the FAQs and Privacy Page, it was quite clear that the data was only available through a private URL that I could share with others.

Well, that’s obviously not the case. My guess is that I may have shared the link via social media and now the page is being indexed by Google. In viewing the page contents, there is not a NOINDEX meta tag… and worse, the Robots.txt file appears to be totally commented out. As a result, Google has full permission to index the site and pages… your data… and the data of your email recipients.

A simple search of the site shows a number of the Year in Review pages have already been indexed by Google. Worse yet, there’s no way for me to unpublish my report. I’ve contacted Toutapp through their website to immediately remove the report.

Was it my fault that the data got published? I suppose it could have been… but ToutApp needs to make it very clear in their instructions if this information AND the information about your email recipients is going to be published. Also interesting is that they’re publishing email addresses out there unobfuscated… great for SPAMMERS to pick up and run with.

Toutapp needs to immediately offer a means of deleting a report. Otherwise, this may be a lawsuit waiting to happen.


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  • http://twitter.com/Tawheed TK

    Hi Douglas,

    Just to be clear, all Tout Email reports are indeed private (it is your data). You do have the option of sharing that report with others using a unique and private URL (which you did). If you happen to share that report on Twitter or Facebook or some other public social media (which you also did), your report does become public (logically speaking).

    The results in the Google search are only the reports which have been made public by the data owners (e.g. You). 

    I”m glad we were able to help remove your report and avoid such a precarious situation with your business associate. We’re happy to help anyone else and continue to uphold the privacy policies we’ve outlined on our site.

    Thanks,
    TK
    CEO
    ToutApp

    • http://www.marketingtechblog.com Douglas Karr

      TK,  Thanks for responding to this issue. I still take acception to the fact that you allow these pages to be crawled and show up in search results.  Your FAQ does not state what you wrote here in your comment.  You should either block search engines or WARN people that sharing the link will make the data accessible to search engines or the public at large.  I hope you rethink your approach – this is scary information to be made searchable.  At minimum, a button to delete your report should be provided.

      • http://twitter.com/Tawheed TK

        Thanks for the feedback Doug. It was our assumption that people understand that when you share a link in Twitter (and FB in most cases) and Google Plus in almost all cases, Google immediately knows about it and indexes it. This is core to their social strategy in fact.

        We will update our FAQ to make sure this is clearer. 

        We’ll also look into working with Google so that YIR reports are not crawled — seems like it’d be a reasonable request coming from us.

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