{"id":1724,"date":"2020-05-26T12:31:31","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T16:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sharpinnovations.com\/blog\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:29:28","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:29:28","slug":"excuse-me-i-think-your-data-is-showing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharpinnovations.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/excuse-me-i-think-your-data-is-showing\/","title":{"rendered":"Excuse me, I think Your Data is Showing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With the ever-expanding use of digital web applications,\nsites, and services for branding, customer and user engagement, and internal\nfunctions like time tracking and employee communication, there is an equally\nincreasing amount of data continuity loss. Businesses need to be on the alert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few business owners, employees, or even webmasters are aware of the expansive indexing ability of search bots used by the top search engines. It is easy to find companies that have saved private lead data, internal documents, and customers\u2019 personal data to the web if you know how to use search modifiers.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

\"search <\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For example, if you\ntype the following into Google Search:  +attendees\n+email ext:xlsx<\/em><\/a>, you\u2019re likely to find a ton of private lead data for a\nwide variety of industry expos and corporate meetings. How did that get there?\nWell, most of the time, someone was in a rush and uploaded their lead tracking\ndata to the media or document folder of their website and simply forgot about\nit. This can also happen when your connected web application used for inputting\nthis information is not saving your files to a non-indexed subfolder of your\nwebsite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It gets scarier. There are searches that allow anyone to find and access IoT devices like smart home cameras, or expose password lists saved to private Trello boards, as well as full backups of email inboxes or company Quickbooks backup files. Any savvy internet user could utilize this information as a foothold and systematically take over a business\u2019s critical services, steal identities, or compromise customer data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"internet <\/figure>\n\n\n\n

See What Data You are Showing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Using simple search modifiers, you can check to see what\ndocuments Google is indexing on your website<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Google home page, enter this: site:yourdomain.com. <\/em>You\u2019re likely to come across the top pages for your specific site, but by adding an additional modifier like ext:pdf you will now see all of the PDF documents Google is indexing for your site. This works for an ever-expanding amount of file types like CSV, XLSX, DOCX, Txt, Zip. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doing a search like site:yourdomain.com ext: (<\/em>leaving\nthe extension modifier blank) will often return a list of non-web file types.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If You Find Data Online that You Don’t Want Online, What Should You Do?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So, let\u2019s say you have found a customer list with email and\ncontact information open and indexable on your website, and you want to remove\nit from the search results. The steps you should take are as follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n