Google Blogoscoped

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Mistakenly Logged In to Google As Someone Else?

Several users from Singapore are telling me that their Google accounts get mixed up. Derick N. at his blog posts about how Google thinks he’s another user, and how furthermore, messages are posted under his name which he did not post.

Priyadarsan Venugopalan, who first contacted me about this back on April 3rd, tells me that while he was browsing the Google Apps help center, he suddenly realized “that instead of my email ( priyadarsan...@gmail.com ), the interface is showing Maximilian...@gmail.com. I thought it’s some kinda minor bug and it will be prompting for my account once i refresh. It didn’t happen. I tried posting a message in one of the thread and to my surprise, the post came in as Maximilian...’s. I dropped an email to the account holder as well.”

Priyadarsan says he was asked to login when he tried to access Gmail or the My Account page, but that other pages were browsable (he says he was able to access data from Google Notebook, Google Profile, iGoogle, Google Video, Analytics and more). He also says this happened in both Chrome and Firefox, and that he’s not using a proxy. “I posted the issues at security@google.com, which went unanswered,” he tells me today (I’m not sure how long the wait was so far).

Peter B., another user whose account was mixed up (and who also uses Google Apps), says “At the time, I though perhaps google was somehow defaulting to a ’pretend’ person until my own profile was created... obviously this mustn’t be the case.”

[Thanks to everyone involved!]

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!