Japan officials mistakenly reveal internal memos

not in enligsh me guess and if it was in Japanese language only China can read it correctly :) anyway, even if serious it will end up saying : shouganai !

And they wonder why they did not get the F-22....

Japan doesn't need Wikileaks or a Snowden ... it has its own squealers ... in the form of a bunch of nitwits from the government and even the Yomiuri Shimbun. Guess nobody can get mad at these lamebrains ...

some14some: "not in enligsh me guess and if it was in Japanese language only China can read it correctly :)"

It likely is in Japanese. But once you've seen/saved the file even if you can't understand it it would be easy enough to translate and/or put up on public sites for reproduction.

Anyway, edojin is right... why is Japan one of if not the most technologically advanced nation on the planet and yet so many people don't know how to use the stuff on an everyday basis? As for not being 'top secret', I'd bet if information about the Yomiuri execs' families patient records were released to the public they'd be singing a different tune.

Better to setup Sharepoint in the own company to avoid security problems and damages .

What is funny is that Google+'s main selling point is that the security settings were supposed to be much more easy to understand than FB, and that you had to explicity say which people got to see what.

Guess not!

The Yomiuri also reported that hospitals and schools had uploaded patients’ and students’ records.

And just what has been done about it? There are just too many people in this country that are seriously dumb about net security. They live with their heads in the sand and think that no one is going to bother them. Idiots!

afanofjapan - To be fair, nobody has mentioned Google+ until you did in your comment. This story was regarding Google Groups; a separate part of Google.

Why the heck are government officials using Google Groups for communication? In the 21st century (or the 21th century as it is often written), they cannot figure out a more secure way to communicate?

Once something is typed into a computer, it stands the chance of being read by everyone in the world, until the end of time. People with common sense should act accordingly.

Why are hospital records being uploaded online? So much for that privacy act. Japan really is its own worst enemy.

Thankfully they didn't use Twitter, because someone is now making a whole database for every public tweet ever made and it would be hard to delete the delicate information.

Second thing, I daresay that Google is a reliable company. It informed me once that someone tried to hack my account. It was quite a while ago, but in the light of current events regarding spying in Europe I don't feel surprised at all. Too bad that I don't know anything interesting }:~)

Nimrods

Was the English a little too difficult to understand, perhaps? What a bunch of clowns.

Google groups?

I mean shouldn't they be using their own in-house server/ forum, and have their own team of tech guys running it, and keeping it safe from hacking, (never mind an inexperienced users settings miss).

I mean, I'm no tech expert, but, this just seems like too low level of a miss. Why are they on Google? Is that what Obama is on too??

Yawn.

It astounds me that large companies etc put so much trust in google and these so called on line providers. They think that they can get away with a cheap easy solution using Google rather than hiring their own IT specialists. The end result is that stupid mistakes like this happen. They thought they would save heaps on IT but instead they never realized they could have paid for a whole IT section rather than paying for the potential court cases that may incur.

Leave it to people that don't check what the settings are after setting up the group and the fact that Google has stuff you don't want turned by default; bad combination!

I am sure no one is even interested in what these J govt. fools had to say on that Google Group (except for the Koreans, Chinese, Russians and the CIA,NSA etc..)

Was the English a little too difficult to understand, perhaps? What a bunch of clowns.

google groups (and anything else on google) is available in Japanese.

Google reads all posts anyway and pass them to CIA, NSA , SIS and friends. In fact it is stupid to use Google services.

“We have taken corrective steps,” an environment ministry spokesman told AFP.

"We've now clicked 'group only' on the drop-down menu."

Google+'s main selling point

It's not google +. It's mailing lists like there was usenet before. I use it to exchange jokes, recipes, game answers with friends, but I wouldn't use groups for professional content, or photos i wouldn't show to my neighbors. One thing is they never said that would be confidential, even with the "privacy settings", that means browsers don't archive, but... I would know how to access, and I'm not the CIA.

omg, Google Groups?! It doesn't what private setting you using, Google passes all the information to the USA government and American business that competes with the Japanese corporations anyway.

the world is manipulated by google...!!

not in enligsh me guess and if it was in Japanese language only China can read it correctly

Of course! Everyone knows that only Asians can read Asian languages. Its genetic....

If you believe that, you probably believe that it was Chinese who translated the google instructions into Japanese and left out privacy instructions so they could get the Japanese data.