Takeout users may have had their Google Photo files shared with strangers. The tech company sent out a series of emails to its users informing them about a bug that plagued Google’s systems between the 21st and 25th of November. The error resulted in Google Photos files like pictures and videos being shared to the wrong users.
Google Takeout is a service that allows users to export their data from Google’s services. Google will package the activity logs and make them available for download for personal storage, enabling people to have copies of their data separate from Google’s servers. Usually, Google Takeout sends its users a download link containing their data. The bug, which affected 0.01 percent of Google Takeout users who tried to export their Google Photos data, resulted in users receiving the wrong download link.
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Google sent an email to affected parties informing them of the error. Jon Oberheide, a co-founder of Duo Security, posted one of the emails on Twitter. “To be clear, this is a big screw-up,” Oberheide wrote, “I hope the number of affected parties is small, but the impact on those parties could be high.” In response to Oberheide requesting more information on the situation, Google’s support team wrote, “In cases where we know that another person has downloaded at least one of a user’s videos, we have said so. Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide a full list of impacted videos.”
Is Your Data on Google’s Cloud Safe?
While cloud storage comes with significant advantages, namely the ability to share and store data, data breaches like these raise concerns over the nature of that storage. Data uploaded to a server is less secure than if it remained on a single device. While reputable cloud storage isn’t insecure by any means, it’s like parking a car in a public parking garage – the protection is there, but what happens to your data isn’t under your control.
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Source: Engadget
