Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Bad PDF formatting reveals Google Voice numbers

Google Voice may not have made it onto the iPhone yet, but the service has still managed to attract more than 1.4 million users.

In a story posted Friday, BusinessWeek is reporting that Google Voice has grown to 1.419 million users, 40 percent--fully 570,000--of whom use the service every day. The information comes from documents in which Google responded to questions from U.S. regulators interested in whether the search giant is improperly blocking calls to phone numbers in specific rural areas of the country.

But while the information about the number of users of the service was included in the documents Google handed over, they were not meant to be made public.

"Though the number of Google Voice customers was redacted in the version that was made public, BusinessWeek reviewed the information in the redacted sections," BusinessWeek reporter Arik Hesseldahl wrote. "'We had intended to keep sensitive information regarding our partners and the number of Google Voice users confidential,' Google said in a statement to BusinessWeek. 'Unfortunately, the PDF submitted to the (U.S. Federal Communications Commission) was improperly formatted.'"

Hessedahl added that subsequently, the FCC has replaced the first letter on its site with one in which the information originally intended to be redacted has been blacked out.

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