Google Employee Reportedly Behind Old Nintendo Leak

Nowadays, you have to be really careful with your data, but I don't think any precautions could save you from every leak possible, and big companies are not an exception. Nintendo fell victim to Google employees' access about 6 years ago. 

One worker got access to private videos on Nintendo’s YouTube channel and leaked several announcements to their froend, according to 404 Media, which obtained an internal Google database tracking potential privacy and security issues reported between 2013 and 2018.

The leak showed images of a trailer for Yoshi's Crafted World and reached Reddit before the game's official reveal. In the comments, as pointed out by GamesRadar, the creator of the thread said "My friend work at google and he send this photo to me. It's a video that it's already in Nintendo channel and is going to be in public after the reveal." 

After an internal interview, it was concluded that the leak was "non-intentional" as the worker, a former temporary contractor, sent it to their friend only.

This is a pretty mild issue compared to what else 404 Media got their hands on. Apparently, Google's speech service collected an "estimated 1K child speech utterances," stored license plate information received via Street View, and leaked the trips and home addresses of carpool users through Waze.

Google says that every issue was reviewed and resolved at that time: "In some cases, these employee flags turned out not to be issues at all or were issues that employees found in third party services."

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