Google Docs Privacy Infringement Continues Their Run Of Dropping The Ball

Google holds our lives in its primary-coloured hands, but it’s not until they do things like accidentally letting loose a few personal documents to people users don’t know, that we realise just how powerful they are. 

There has been a worrying privacy issue with Google’s Document and Spreadsheet products; in response they have sent notices to a number of users, although Google says that it was a small incident affecting less than .05 per cent of all documents. The letters read: “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.”

With the amount of information we feed into Google each day, personal information, this all makes that nervous feeling in the pit of our stomachs turn into a constant gurgle. It’s getting worse as it seems like “dropping the ball” is a recurring theme with Google lately, what with Gmail going down last month for two hours, affecting 25 million users. Then there was the phishing trip by ViddyHo on Google Chat, and the Google AdSense outage too. 

We previously discussed the Gdrive, a maybe-in-development cloud application that stores a person’s personal files and operating system on Google’s own servers and is accessed via the Internet. We also touched on the topic of Google Latitude, that lovely new human tracking device. Imagine that went haywire and someone you thought you had blocked could now pinpoint the exact location you were? Imagine the social awkwardness!

As we venture ever deeper into Google’s cloud, the horror stories of lost information, compromised privacy and service outages are only going to increase. What’s interesting is how Twitter is filling the gap – people turned to the service during the Gmail outage, and it’s increasingly being used in lieu of actual emailing. So where will the first Twitter outage send people scurrying to? Hotmail?!

Posted by Trista Orchard in Sci-tech | March 10, 2009 2:45PM |