A flood of reported privacy incidents from Google confirms, incidentally, that a Nintendo game leak from 2017 happened thanks to a YouTube contractor

Gaming IndustryA flood of reported privacy incidents from Google confirms, incidentally, that a Nintendo game leak from 2017 happened thanks to a YouTube contractorWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Symbolic photo: Logo of the video platform YouTube on June 07, 2023 in Berlin, Germany.

Sometimes, game leaks are dramatic, unpleasant things—like the disturbingInsomniac hacksthat happened late last year, revealing developer’s private information due to a ransomware group. More often than not, however, they occur for simple, hindsight-stupid reasons, as recently-leaked documents from Google reveal.

Among “thousands” of other incidents, the report indicates that a “Google employee accessed private videos in Nintendo’s YouTube account, and leaked information ahead of Nintendo’s planned announcements.” 404Medialater linkedthis entry to aleak posted on the Nintendo subreddit in 2017.

The post itself shares a phone picture of a webpage carrying the “admin” prefix, indicating that the page was accessed on Google’s internal systems. The game in question is titled “Yoshi for the Nintendo Switch”, later released as Yoshi’s Crafted World in 2019.

The original poster, who has since deleted their account,wrote: “My friend works at Google and he sent this photo to me. It’s a video that’s already on the Nintendo channel and is going to be in public after the reveal.”

Shortly after it debuted, a Google employee flagged the leak, which revealed the game “well ahead of Nintendo’s public E3 announcement”. 404Media’s follow-up also adds that the leaker was a TVC—a “temporary vendor contractor”.

This bolsters the idea that many videogame leakers get their info from private YouTube videos—which aren’t accessible unless you’re in charge of the channel or, naturally, on Google’s payroll with certain privileges and loose lips. Someone shares details with a buddy they think they trust, and suddenly you’ve sprung a leak if you choose to put your trailers on YouTube which, let’s face it, you’re going to do.

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The Yoshi leak in particular is fairly innocuous—however, 404Media’s report also highlights some more harmful examples of security breaches. These include accidentally recording children’s voices, as well as exclusion software failing and accidentally creating a “database of geolocated licence plate numbers” in Google’s internal systems, via Google Maps.

I’m not particularly interested in rushing to Google’s defence, here—these leaks aren’t great—but in the interest of fairness, this serves as a reminder that nothing you do online is evertrulyprivate or 100% secure in general.

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