Have you ever wondered how lead providers get your contact information to solicit your business? Well, let me tell you how they do this and how it may have just got easier for them.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau it is recommend that lead generators give the user the names and phone numbers of the businesses that will be calling them. The idea is to give more transparency to the consumer and inform them of which companies will be calling and how many companies they should expect calls from. Overall a good recommendation that lead generators should consider. One major problem that lead generators have to consider before doing this is that by placing this information on your thank you page you are opening the door for your competitors to steal your buyers information and solicit to them.

According to Search Engine watch via OverPricedDad  Google is now crawling wabsite forms for relevant content. In very simple terms Google is filling out lead forms to see what comes up on the next page. This is according to Google Webmaster Central:

“We might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.”

This means that Thank You pages and private data may be indexed and available to the public. This includes your contact information. Now for some of you this may be the only viability  to Google you may ever have and you may think this is great. To many, many businesses this is outrageous. The thought Google filling out forms just to see what is on the other side is a little scary. The best thing you can do is to disallow the Google spider from crawling the pages.

Another privacy issue you should be concerned with was pointed out by PC World today and involves Google Calender.

The data is out there thanks to the Search Google Calendar a feature added to Google’s Web-based calendar service last November. Google bills it as a cool way to discover interesting events, but a few quick searches show that it can also be used to turn up sensitive corporate information that was inadvertently made public using Google Calendar.

According to the article people that use Google calender now have there information available to the public. This means that your employees that you may not even know who use Google Calender could be leaking sensitive information.

Further searching revealed that quite a few corporate calendars can be found on Google Calendar yielding such tidbits as the date and time of vendor meetings and names of projects in the works. Dial information could also be seen Tuesday on other calendars for calls on topics such as “Deloitte’s V2 Status Meeting- Updated” and “Compliance Overview.”

Google’s ultimate goal of relevant results is opening the door to more and more risks of theft and fraud. Something to be concerned about, in my opinion.

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