A glitch in Google Docs opened client information to be shared by non-authorised users, Cnet reported.
“Google discovered a privacy glitch that inappropriately shared access to a small fraction of word-processing and presentation documents stored on the company’s online Google Docs service,” Cnet stated.
Google claims only .05% of information were left vunerable during this period. Interestingly, FedEx used to say they lost under 1% of packages – but when you thought of the millions they delivered every day the number was over 100,000. Given the increased usage of Google Docs, that ,05% could also have been in the hundreds of thousands.
“Though the documents were shared only with people whom the Google Docs users had already shared documents, rather than with the world at large, the problem illustrates one downside of cloud computing, in which Internet servers host software previously run on a person’s own computer,” Cnet noted.