Google app sharing exposes corporate data
What's up with Docs?
Published: 9 March 2009 15:51 GMT by Tim Ferguson
Show related articlesThe security of Google Docs has been compromised after a bug caused documents to be shared with the wrong people.
The bug, which gave some Docs users access to documents they weren't entitled to view, occurred between people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document.
The problem - which affected around 0.05 per cent of documents on the service - was resolved on Friday.
In a statement Google said: "We have extensive safeguards in place to protect all documents, and are confident this was an isolated incident."
According to a blog entry by Google Docs product manager, Jennifer Mazzon, the problem only occurred on certain documents when people carried out a specific sequence of actions.
The bug struck when the document owner or collaborator selected multiple documents and then changed the sharing permissions. Google said spreadsheets were not affected.
In order to fix the issue, Google disabled the sharing rights for collaborators and viewers on affected documents and then emailed the users to let them know that they needed to reinstate their document rights.
Mazzon said the company was also affected by the bug internally and Google has apologised for the problem.
Business and personal users of Google Mail recently suffered a global outage of Google Mail service for several hours, causing some to question the wisdom of keeping so much data in the cloud.
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