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After Facebook and Instagram, the U.S. leading search engine giant Google Inc has now joined the controversy by stating that its company too was storing the user’s data including the password in plain text for more than 14 years.
In an blog by Suzanne Frey, Vice President of Engineering at Google wrote in blog post that “The company was storing the passwords of G- suite users in a plain text for 14 years in its encrypted internal systems,” However, the company also confirmed that the google did not store the passwords of its free users on the servers.
Talking the incident, Suzanne Fed said that “We made an error when implementing this functionality back in 2005: The admin console stored a copy of the unhashed password. This practice did not live up to our standards, and to be clear, these passwords remained in our secure encrypted infrastructure. This issue has been fixed, and we have seen no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords.”
Adding more on this, Frey said that “The issue has now fixed and as a precautionary process, Google will be resetting the accounts of all those users who have not changed their passwords by themselves.”
“Again, we have seen no evidence of improper access to or misuse of the affected passwords. We will continue with our security audits to ensure this is an isolated incident,” Frey added.