This issue was raised, when Information week reported that numerous UK O2 mobile network customers complained that many of the photos that had been taken with their mobiles phones and tagged as private were now publicly accessible online.

According to Ken Simpson (CEO, MailChannels), one of the primary reasons for this breach of privacy was that, Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. In a statement, he said, If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit.

However, Matt Cutts plainly denies this allegation and states, Sorry, but if Ken Simpson is implying that the Google Toolbar led to these urls being crawled, then hes mistaken. Citing an example Matt asserts that Google Toolbar does not in any ways, help Google index URLs. According to Matt, when he ran the URL in question, i.e -inurl:mms2legacy-, the very first result that came up was, the search results would be displayed with multiple references for the given string. This, according to Cutts is a clear indication that all the URLs assessed had been discovered by crawling regular old links.

Here at PageTraffic Blog, I had put up a related post in December 2006, where Matt Cutts had made it crystal clear that, Google Toolbar does not cause the pages to be indexed.

However, when faced with a question related to Googlebot crawling, Matt had this to say:

Q: Why is Googlebot downloading information from our secret web server?

Ans: (Matt Cutts) Its almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your secret server to another web server, your secret URL may appear in the referrer tag and can be stored and published by the other web server in its referrer log. So, if theres a link to your secret web server or page on the web anywhere, its likely that Googlebot and other web crawlers will find it.

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