Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch is reporting on a letter from The Google Docs Team addressing a bug that let some docs be shared without the owner's knowledge. Their "fix" removes shared readers and collaborators from some documents and presentations. The document may then be manually reshared by its owner.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/huge-google-privacy-blunder-shares-your-docs-without-permission/
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That's why friday night, a colleague and me were both working on a google doc, and we were disconnected from the document edition several times... it was boring.
Even if it is 0.05%, I think it's good that google has made this error public. |
I got that email as one of my presentations got affected by the bug. Lucky it wasn't anything private. |
Google wrote: > a bug which may have caused you to share some of your > documents without your knowledge
Umm, shouldn't this be: > a bug which may have caused *us* to share some of your > documents without your knowledge
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"you" Umm, shouldn't this be: *us*
Yes and no. The sharing was initiated by the users, Google Docs had a flaw which caused the document to become shared with more than the the user selected persons.
So it was not fortunately not Google Docs spontaneously sharing users document, it was Google Docs sharing to more persons than intended.
And of course don't expect Google to formulate anything that could be legally self accusing... ;)
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Exact reason I hesitate using these third party products for email or document storage. Look for more of this in the future.
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From Apps Status Dashboard page:
"We've identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users may have inadvertently shared some of their documents without their knowledge. ...." |