March 7th, 2009
Google accidentally exposes private documents
Google has confirmed that they made a mistake that made some documents that were supposed to be private, shared. How many documents were affected? Obviously I don’t know, but we might get a better idea if we look at some Google Docs usage statistics.
In September 2008, Compete says that 4.4 million unique users visited Google Docs in September — that’s only one month worth of traffic. For argument sake, let’s say Compete is correct, and each of those people have created only one document in Google docs in their life.
The official response from Google states that 0.05% of all documents were affected — that would actually mean somewhere around 220,000 if my low-ball estimate is close.
We fixed the bug, which affected less than 0.05% of documents, and removed any collaborators. We also contacted the users who were affected to notify them of the bug and to identify which of their documents may have been affected. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect all documents, and are confident this was an isolated incident.
This is one of the problems with cloud computing. Your stuff isn’t in your control, you basically have to trust people you don’t know to keep your stuff safe. The other problem is that the infrastructure, even if it’s robust and scalable, isn’t in your control either. When there is an outage, the best you can do is wait.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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