Google Hangouts/GTalk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients

http://www.zdnet.com/google-hangoutsgtalk-glitch-sends-chats-to-wrong-recipients-7000021195/

by CWIZO • 13 years ago

230 146 13 years ago

CWIZO2• 13 years ago

This just happened to me. I recieved messages (in gmail) from a contact that ware meant for his wife.

Be careful! I guess the best course of action is not to use gmail chat until google announces they have fixed the issue.

houk2• 13 years ago

No, trust has been broken.

You can't tell me you have confidence that this randomly won't happen again in the future? It's shattered mine.

CWIZO2• 13 years ago

Off course. I'll probably never use gmail chat for anything sensetive.

mseebach7• 13 years ago

Your search for perfect, flawless permanent security will be long, lonely and ultimately fruitless.

Already you've cut yourself off from flying, riding on trains and driving. Nobody can guarantee that deadly accidents will never happen, and indeed they do happen.

Presumably you only eat food your grow yourself. There are regular instances of contamination in the industrial food sector. Not that any guarantees can really be made, but at least contamination will be mostly your own fault.

See where I'm going with this?

bluecalm5• 13 years ago

This tend to happen when your policy is to stop supporting tested, established protocols for chat clients and introducing your own in beta version to the entire planet at once.

timmipetit• 13 years ago

This also just happened to me. Some messages that I send (using the browser) to a friend were received by someone else. A messages intended for my girlfriend was received by a coworker. My Hangouts app (Android) actually showed these messages in the "wrong" conversation.

bendoernberg• 13 years ago

Good thing I've gotten most of the friends I chat with regularly to switch to OTR-enabled chat clients.

devx2• 13 years ago

Yeah, can we get OTR in Hangouts already, Google? (no, not that "we're not archiving it - promise!" OTR)

simias2• 13 years ago

What would be a correct OTR implementation for you? For in-browser chat you'll have to trust them at some point anyway...

Ueland• 13 years ago

Was about to create a thread on /r/netsec and ask what was going on, or if i had gone crazy, after a former colleague of me got everything i wrote to my fiancee.

Pretty horrible bug.

A Norwegian example/proof: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83758451/Screenshot_2013...

curiousDog• 13 years ago

Wow, I've always fully trusted gtalk. Even sent over my SSN and credit card details. Never again.

mseebach7• 13 years ago

Well, you shouldn't do that, ever.

That said, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

r0h1n3• 13 years ago

perfect is the enemy of the good

While I agree with that statement in general, I couldn't quite make out what you meant by it in this context.

Are you saying "good" = "most of the times your Google messages will go to the intended recipients" and "perfect" = "all of the times your messages will go to the intended recipients"?

simula67• 13 years ago

perfect is the enemy of the good.

Yep, that is what they say. You know what else they say ?

"The enemy of good is good enough"

and also

"A witty saying proves nothing".

devx2• 13 years ago

You probably should've stopped doing that after the PRISM revelations anyway.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Yeah, because the NSA wants to buy stuff with your CC number.

acchow2• 13 years ago

We deserve a public and highly detailed post-mortem.

Sarkie• 13 years ago

Do we?

r0h1n3• 13 years ago

You don't?

amirmc5• 13 years ago

Yes, we do. Especially all those business users who have paid for GApps and have trusted Google with their comms.

In general, we deserve to have more decentralised services that are built on the principle of 'privacy by design', rather than 'trust by design'. Maybe, screw-ups like this can help spur more efforts in that regard.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

We do, this is a huge violation of the trust people place in google's chat / hangouts. It doesn't matter that many people don't pay for the product, free or not there is an implicit contract between google and its users that things like this should not happen. Moreover, many people have paid subscriptions to google apps and obviously give them money directly.

cremnob• 13 years ago

I wonder if Larry Page will have to write an apology letter over this.

bsullivan01• 13 years ago

Here it is: "Contractors are responsible for this. They are no longer working with us" :-)

http://www.slashgear.com/google-blames-rogue-contractors-for...

ddalex• 13 years ago

Just happening to me, I thought I was going mad.

It happens on regular accounts, not just Business, I've seen it this morning when I got messages intended for somebody else.

I would refrain to send any sensitive information over Google Talk right now.

amirmc5• 13 years ago

"I would refrain to send any sensitive information over Google Talk right now."

Why only "right now"? Why ever send sensitive information over a 3rd party's server. While I believe that Google will find and fix the problem, they probably make little to no claims about the level of security they offer. So using them at all should be a calculated risk.

manojlds2• 13 years ago

So how else do you send them?

elango• 13 years ago

Two days back, the Mute function did not work on Google Hangout. Had to use the mute function on Mac.

wintersFright• 13 years ago

Someone's continuous deployment process is about to get mirred in bureaucracy and paperwork

CraigJPerry• 13 years ago

:-)

Releasing is hard to scale up like google have to. How many apps are they releasing to daily...!

It's not technical building blocks (they can all be automated), not even busy work, just complex intertwined dependencies from completely different, often non-electronic, domains.

Hypothetical release co-ordinator speaking: "Did app A release this morning into EMEA prod? Ok that means app B can go but only once the security review team drop their veto. Has release candidate 2 been promoted to the canary environment yet? Remember B's new deployment process is in scope this release, and do not release to the 5 servers in the BCP datacentre today..."

Could you imagine managing the constant evolution of a rules engine to replace a good quality release co-ordinator? I don't think i'd be able to sleep!

As far as i can see, continous deployment doesn't have the general applicability that continuous delivery enjoys.

est• 13 years ago

No, releasing is easy, until your established process get fucked up by an Indian PM asking you to "integrate" features into G+

manojlds2• 13 years ago

Here's the status link - http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1380220199...

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Suddenly I'm very glad Talk has never been available in my country. After this I doubt they would have any hope of getting it past EU privacy laws anyway.

Edit:

As the people below have pointed out Voice isn't available to me - Talk is.

koyote• 13 years ago

Wait, Talk is country restricted?

stickydink• 13 years ago

Talk is everywhere, OP probably means Voice, which isn't.

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

I find it very strange a simple instant messaging client would not be available in your country. Are you thinking of Google Voice?

VMG• 13 years ago

You're assuming of course that EU companies have a better privacy track record.

playhard• 13 years ago

I just opened the chat tab and i was shocked to see the conversation i had with my co-founder sent to my college friend. Two more lines from the same conversation was sent to my friend's brother. This is serious.

pkallberg• 13 years ago

Sounds like chat roulette on a grand scale!

nmridul• 13 years ago

What if this happened with Gmail ? My bank details and other data getting displayed on someone's Inbox !

EDIT - I don't use gtalk for sending confidential info, so this doesn't affect me, but this could also happen with Gmail that I trust lot of data with (bank, school, government etc)..

stinos• 13 years ago

I don't understand what your bank details are doing in your mail? Or what do you mean by 'details'?

capecodcarl• 13 years ago

This is probably a good reminder that you should never send anything in unencrypted e-mail that you wouldn't be willing to write on a postcard and send via USPS.

davidjgraph• 13 years ago

Tut, always so negative. I told an old friend this morning that I was going to charge the anal probe, of course I meant that remark to my co-founder.

Haven't talked to him in ages, we had a good chat and we're going to meet for a drink at the weekend (sans probe). Cheers Google!

stingraycharles• 13 years ago

This is irrelevant. Just because you had a positive experience from it doesn't make this bug less serious.

pauletienney• 13 years ago

Why so serious ?

Mustafabei• 13 years ago

Sheldon? Is that you?

eknkc2• 13 years ago

Maybe he has a thing for probes?

vs4vijay• 13 years ago

Same here...

7952• 13 years ago

In situations like this I would actually prefer it if the service went offline until fixed.

ekns• 13 years ago

I've had this happen with facebook chat once maybe two years ago. I wonder if there have been other places where something like this has happened...

c-a• 13 years ago

Wouldn't a problem like this call for pulling the service off while it's being investigated/fixed?

nknighthb• 13 years ago

At this time Google Talk is not functioning correctly and we are continuing to work to restore full functionality.

This is where you turn it off until you fix it. This isn't a service disruption, this is a service malfunction with far more serious potential consequences than delayed emails, or inability to download an app, or duplicate credit card charges, and you can't fix those consequences after the fact, not even by applying vast amounts of money.

GvS• 13 years ago

I think they turned off Hangouts and reverted to old talk. I noticed that messages I've tried to send with Hangouts from G+ web page were not delivered and chats from gtalk dekstop client are saved in gmail as "chat" not "hangout"

smithzvk• 13 years ago

Maybe this explains why us people that link our SIP to the PSTN via Googlo Talk haven't been able to do so for the last 18 hours or so? Maybe they are attempting to figure out what they can safely turn off/revert.

Edit: A bit of reading says that this probably is unrelated...

DangerousPie• 13 years ago

Time for some Russian roulette: Send offensive messages to random people on your GTalk and see who receives them!

sanyi• 13 years ago

I have experienced this bug for years: everything I send over GTalk goes to the NSA.

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

Well, now I'm glad I convinced most of my friends to install OTR. I do wish there were an XMPP-supporting instant messaging service with a good mobile app, though. Google Talk has gone to hell after it got turned into Hangouts...

philsnow• 13 years ago

Use straight jabber/xmpp ? Sign up for a jabber.org account (or hell run your own ejabberd). I think there are some decent mobile clients.

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, there just cannot be a good mobile client unless it supports push notifications, which requires server support, which XMPP doesn't have. The existing clients need to keep a connection open and take too much battery, sadly...

stevoo• 13 years ago

Just happend to me today. A coworker was writing to someone else and everything was coming to me as well.

sssparkkk2• 13 years ago

Besides the fact that this is a pretty serious bug, I'm rather underwhelmed by the care Google has been taking of their hangouts product after releasing it last May.

And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing' (it's a design decision on their end), but more the general experience of using hangouts.

As far as I can tell you're still not able to mute the new message sound, without turning off notifications all together (hangouts in Gmail). Chatter picking up in a hangout and you want to mute it for a while? Again, not possible. Turn off all notifications for that hangout and chances are you'll completely forget you were ever part of that conversation (snoozing notifications hangouts-wide makes sure you miss all other personal messages sent to you as well).

Uploading a photo on a slow network is a pretty terrible experience: it'll start telling you the upload has failed and it's retrying (no progress to be seen anywhere). If you delete the message and try again, you'll probably end up with two of the same messages in your conversation, because often it doesn't appear to correctly 'receive' your deletion request either.

When you've received a photo that you need to save to your gallery (maybe you want to zoom-in a little, or share it with someone else?), be prepared to hit that save button for a while until you finally get a confirmation that the photo has actually been saved.

Stuff like this is not a problem when it's your first release, but 4 months on you'd expect a company like Google to be able to iron out quirks like these. But no, we get extra emoji as one of the few updates to the hangouts platform.

[edit: spelling]

liquid_x• 13 years ago

There's now a mute sound option in gmail, click on the down arrow next to your name above the contacts list

sssparkkk2• 13 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out, last time I checked there was no such thing.

nodata• 13 years ago

And I'm not even talking about things like online-status 'missing'

Can someone tell me what the green underline beneath an avatar meant then?

MasterScrat• 13 years ago

It's binary: you're there or not. You can't be idle or busy anymore, which sucks pretty hard for regular users.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

The green underline isn't in the Android app, unfortunately.

bluecalm5• 13 years ago

Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning. It also loses message regularly so I am now used to ask for copy pasting if it's obvious something got lost. Blatant disregard of things like sorting via status (or displaying that at all) or introducing more of them is another thing. It looks like some crazy manager designed his evil plan and convinced all his bosses that it's the way to go. The app sucks, everyone I know hates it, they forced feeded it to users with Android update with no way to go back to gtalk.

It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done. Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead. /rant

freyr• 13 years ago

I've noticed the same thing with Apple's Messages. Sometimes messages arrive on my phone, sometimes on the Messages application on my laptop, sometimes both. Even when a message arrives at both locations, there's often a significant delay between the arrivals.

It's a shame these companies are taking over messaging and neither seems capable of providing a decent user experience.

ZoFreX• 13 years ago

Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead.

I believe you could call this "Embrace, extend, extinguish"?

rryan2• 13 years ago

Killing the competition? There is lots of healthy competition in the messaging/chat space:

Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, iMessage, SnapChat, Instagram, Skype, etc.

If anything gChat is a struggling platform that didn't make the transition to the mobile era -- that's the entire reason Hangouts exists.

Edited: to use more polite tone.

twistedpair• 13 years ago

Remember, Google services are "eventually consistent." You just haven't waited long enough.

easytiger• 13 years ago

Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning

I use it every day and don't think i get anything like this issue (for balance)

rzendacott2• 13 years ago

Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.

bluecalm5• 13 years ago

So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now. Just one use case for online statuses. Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.

Peaker• 13 years ago

Using gtalk for SMS was so much more convenient, because you could just press the contact icon, and get gtalk as an option.

They've removed this integration in Android, and now you have to go re-find that contact in a separate hangouts app. It's a terrible UI regression.

mcpherrinm• 13 years ago

It depends on your use case.

Where I work, we use google apps, and so everyone has each other on Gtalk. We use the status line to indicate whether somebody is WFH or OOO, which works great. But with hangouts, I lose that information. Worse yet, it doesn't show my contacts that I don't talk to, which is bad because I care about their online status. Even worse yet, if I "revert to old chat", but reply to somebody using my phone where I don't have that option, that conversation get sucked into the hangout side and I don't get it in my email anymore.

So hangouts is now hiding information I need and unreliable at delivering messages. That makes it worse than useless: If it wasn't there, I would at least use some alternative. It would be better for it not to exist.

marsvskittens• 13 years ago

Oh god, the notifications. There doesn't seem to be any intelligent targeting for them. Whenever I receive a message, every single client I have gets notified regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm actively typing into my android hangout client, chances are my tablets and my gmail tabs don't need to beep to let me know there's a new message.

apetresc• 13 years ago

You're forgetting the worst offender: the old Gchat let you tab through the input boxes of the different chats. On Hangouts, tab just cycles you through every UI element on the page.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

To be fair,that's the proper behavior the tab key on a desktop, and breaking from that is breaking the standard behavior. Offering a hotkey makes sense, but tab isn't it.

thirtyseven• 13 years ago

Not sure why it isn't documented, but you can cycle through chat windows with Ctrl-. and Ctrl-,

mdup• 13 years ago

For some time I've pretended that anything I write that should be private (IM, mail, etc.) is actually public. Nowadays it has become so easy for your recipient to transfer a mail to the wrong person. Once I've also been victim of my phone sending texts to the wrong people.

So from now on, just write things you can assume in front of the whole world. Don't write shit about people you don't like. Keep that for face-to-face talk with your friends. Things written last so much longer than things said.

Keyframe• 13 years ago

I don't trust hangouts ever since I discovered, by accident, that if you get somebody else's invite you can set their status and messages for the invite in calendar as you want. I reported that to google to which they said it's by design if you're sending out invites to non-google accounts or if invite is received in a non-gmail client. While I understand you can't do it any differently if you want that functionality, but this was on a business account. I'd rather see limited functionality then where you can set status for the invite only in gmail/calendar and if you're non-google account or 3rd party email client you get to only view the invite.

realrocker• 13 years ago

Happened to me this morning. I listened in for a while to my friends chat to his client about a bug, while interfering several times with messages of "wtf" and "what ok?" before realizing the situation and horrified at the prospect of the client receiving my invaluable inputs. Called the guy up in a jiffy and told him about it. It seems that I was just a passive receiver.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

For those who don't see why they should route their communication through a company known to partner with the NSA, try one of the server-less/decentralized/encrypted communication platforms like http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

I'm starting to seriously consider moving my teams away from Google; especially for chat.

Hangouts has been a debacle. I'm furious that the upgrade was shoved down our throats (on Android) for a next-gen tool that was as feature incomplete as the first EA Sports' Madden game on a new gaming system.

nucleardog• 13 years ago

Contrary to the articles suggestion that this is recent (past day or two), this actually happened to me for the first time back on the 20th of the month. It happened between two non-apps (regular Gmail) accounts.

I mean, I watch what I say online anyway, but I sure wasn't expecting Google to force me to open a dialogue with an ex.

archon810• 13 years ago

Google has already fixed it within hours http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1380265199...

goshx3• 13 years ago

well, look again.

goshx3• 13 years ago

I'm sending random messages to random people just to see them freaking out. "Oh, this might be the bug they were talking about this morning"

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

I hope you inform them you were joking. I think it's pretty irresponsible to misrepresent a problem this potentially serious.

goshx3• 13 years ago

Of course, just a good excuse to talk to people I haven't chat for a while. :)

orblivion• 13 years ago

Any idea if this is happening over Jabber clients as well?

gaving• 13 years ago

Deja vu anyone? http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/google-android-sms-bug/

Good going Google.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

I suppose this is a good time as any to ask fellow HN readers for alternatives. Preferably the ones with extra crypto features added in the wake of the PRISM revelations. What alternative chat clients do you use besides/instead of GTalk?

rajesh19062• 13 years ago

Google Talk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients..

houk2• 13 years ago

I am amazed that this hasn't received more attention.

Google Hangouts/GTalk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients

Related Stories