Google Shared Some Users' Docs Without Permission

Google sent a notice to some users of Documents and Spreadsheets in which they stated they may have shared some of their documents with people they didn't granted any access to. The sharing was limited to people "with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document" which sounds like there could be quite a few people who could access your private documents. According to the notice, only text documents and presentations were affected (the spreadsheets weren't affected) and the users are provided with links to documents which may have been affected.


Here is the letter in full, courtesy of TechCrunch:

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

Google wants to expend and to practically own the Internet but they neglect their current services. This comes after two weeks ago, Gmail was down for about 3 hours, so the trust in their services is going downward.