Whoops! Google Leaks Users' Documents from the Cloud

In what's sure to have Google blushing and cloud-based computing opponents hollering "told you so!," the search company issued a notice to users of its Document and Spreadsheet products alerting them that some of their documents may have been inadvertently shared with others.

"This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document," Google Docs Team wrote in a notice. "The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets."

Google blamed the mishap on a bug, which the company claims to have now fixed. In the meantime, Google said it used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents it identified as being affected, and those will need to be re-shared by the owner.

According to Google, this was an isolated incident that affected less than .05 percent of all documents.

Image Credit: Flickr Laurie ::