Full story at the SMH ... If I were responsible for this, I'd not be happy for a number of reasons:

  • If they were using Word 2007, they could have inspected the document and stripped out personally identifiable metadata and the like, before saving as a PDF (via Word)
  • I think there is an ethical question of why this needed to be submitted anonymously.
  • Was a certain web based document creation tool not up to the task of creating a formatting intensive document like this:
Screen grab of the submission to the ACCC showing Google's

Clerical error exposes Google as anonymous eBay critic - BizTech - Technology

Having said that, mistakes make us human, and we learn from them. My heart goes out to whichever poor soul will have to face up to their Legal Department on monday morning.