Ofcourse its not google's fault. Their engineer's can review the security system of school and tell them within 2 minutes that what went wrong..
Gee, this whole issue would have been easier for Google if they had forgotten to index the school's page altogether. We've just discovered the cause of this bad data push - Google is too busy indexing docushare sites
My point is different. Why is google spider indexing password protected student files which has no value to anyone but the student him/herself but not indexing my relevant, extensive content pages
The school system never mentioned having a robots.txt; they just claimed that their "secure" pages, which were password protected, were not supposed to be visible to Google. I think what most of us are saying here, is that a robots.txt file would have been the way to address Google, so the page(s) would not be indexed. This is the only SURE way to keep Google spiders out of pages. If they have a robots.txt file, and Google still crawled and indexed their pages, then that's another story... Still stupid to post such information on the Internet, though...probably a commonplace practice many (or most) parents didn't even know about. This is the REAL issue, I think.
See if you can find a robots.txt at the school's website: -http://www.catawba.k12.nc.us/robots.txt Google removed all of the pages in question from its index and the information is no longer accessible. What a jerk! They don't have a robots.txt to disallow a BOT from indexing their so-called secure pages, yet they shout about their secure systems.
You are most welcome Phynder. School should issue an apology letter to Google and of course, the parents. I do get the feeling that some bad guys (scammers e.t.c.) have already copied the information from G's cache before it was removed. I'm not familiar with the SS numbers or their importance in USA, or what can one do with that information. Can they have their new SS numbers issued?
Would it not be a closer analogy to say someone left there car door open while their car was unattended and someone's dog (i.e. the robot) got in because it had not been trained (programmed) to know that it should not get in other people's cars. There does not appear to be any intent on behalf of google to access restricted material - the case would have to be that the design of the robot was negligent, but google could surely argue that the negligence lay elsewhere.
Actually, wouldn't it be more like he left the car parked in a dealerships lot, with the dealer plates accidentally left on, keys in the ignition... then got all bent out of shape because the dealer mistakenly let someone take it for a test drive? -Michael