Google Docs shares more than it should

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 10 Mar 2009 at 09:42

A bug in Google Docs led to private documents being shared with more people than intended, the company has admitted.

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The service "inadvertently" shared private files with people the document owner had previously collaborated with.

Google insists the bug affected only 0.05% of documents and was only triggered by an unusual sequence of events.

"For this small percentage of documents, the bug (now fixed) occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions," Google Docs product manager, Jennifer Mazzon, writes in a blog post.

Google says that Spreadsheets were not affected, however it's not clear whether the bug affected subscribers to the Premium version of Google Docs, as well as users of the free service. Sharing confidential data could potentially be a breach of data protection laws for businesses.

"As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected," Mazzon insists. "We then emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them."

Intriguingly, Google says the company's own documents were subject to the bug. "We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously," Mazzon adds.

It's the second time in a month the company has been forced to issue a mea culpa. Google apologised to customers in February after Gmail suffered a two-and-a-half-hour blackout.