About Voicemail and Privacy
Source: googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com
There were some conflicting reports yesterday about Google Voice voicemails being searchable online, so we wanted to clarify how Google Voice works.
Google Voice lets you access your voicemails online from your inbox. Your account is password-protected, like any other Google service, and its content cannot be read by anyone unless you choose to share the information in your account.
Google Voice can also send you an email notification when you have a new voicemail. The link points to a web page that displays only that particular message. The web address for that unique message is virtually impossible to guess.
However, if a user copied that unique URL from their email notification, and published it on a public website, then typical search engines, including Google, could have indexed it. Very few people chose to do this: of the millions of voicemail messages left on Google Voice, only 31 messages were made publicly searchable by users.
Nonetheless, three weeks ago, we decided that even if a user chose to include this unique URL in a public website, it would remain unsearchable. Since we implemented that change, no new messages have been indexed.
If you want to publicize a Google Voice message on your website, we provide a special embed code for this purpose. Visitors will then be able to listen to that particular message, but the message itself will remain unsearchable.
