Be Careful Sharing Your Internal Dashboards

Re:Be Careful Sharing Your Internal Dashboards by pmjoyce on Wednesday September 18, 2013 @08:27AM (#6404797)

Paul from Geckoboard here.

To be absolutely clear dashboards are not on Google unless customers decide to put the URL in a blog post or somewhere else on the public internet, this is a non-story.

I.e. no dashboards have been exposed or otherwise leaked by Geckoboard. In order for these dashboards to appear in Google:

  1. Customer switches on sharing for a given dashboard in Geckoboard

  2. Then publishes the sharing URL on the publicly accessible web

  3. Google then indexes that link

In addition to locking down dashboards behind a user/pass or restricting access to only certain IP address customers can, at any time, generate a new sharing URL which denies access to the previous URL.

In a related development we've been advised that this story is being touted around by a PR agency - we're still trying to trace who has employed them but we have a reasonable idea.

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Re:Be Careful Sharing Your Internal Dashboards by anon1385 on Wednesday September 18, 2013 @10:43AM (#6405551)

>To be absolutely clear dashboards are not on Google unless customers decide to put the URL in a blog post or somewhere else on the public internet, this is a non-story.

No. Jut because Google doesn't index a URL doesn't make it private in any way. Public URLs are public. Relying on obscurity is a bad idea. People are continually amazed at how Google is able to find URLs they thought they had not linked publicly anywhere. Send the link to a gmail user? Google knows it now.

I wouldn't worry too much though; any company prepared to trust vital business data to a SaaS web startup obviously doesn't care about data security very much. People put off by this were never going to use your product anyway.

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