No this is not about a new Google service. For those of you that weren’t aware, there was a major disturbance reported on the clouds of the Google Kingdom back on Saturday, Mar. 7th. The glitch took place on the Google platform known as Google Docs, where documents saved on Google Docs were shared with contacts who were never granted access. If a user had ever shared a document with someone using Google Docs, more than likely the user that was granted access gained access to any other documents the granting user had ever shared with anyone else.
Here’s the letter that was sent to Google Docs users:
“Dear Google Docs user,
We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.
To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.
We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.
The Google Docs Team”
This was an isolated incident, which only affected .05% of Google Docs users, but this was major privacy no no for Google. I guess when Google advertises free web services they mean free-for-all?… Whoops!