It happened to Google Takeout users.
For some reason, people trust Google and its due diligence to safely store their photos and videos and make it easily accessible whenever they want to. But, it turns out that even the world’s most high profile platform cannot be trusted blindly.
See: Google admits third-party app developers read your Gmail emails
Reportedly, in November, Google did a massive blunder by sending out videos of some users to Google Takeout archives of complete strangers. Later, the company sent emails to the affected users informing them that for a short duration some of their backed-up videos were mistakenly sent to strangers’ archives.
The news went viral after a Twitter user and Duo Security’s CTO Jon Oberheide shared an email sent to him by Google regarding this issue. The email did not specifically state that the company made a security blunder but we can get hints of a privacy breach from the email’s content.
Email sent by Google (Screenshot credit: Jon Oberheide)
To be clear, this is a big screw-up. I hope the number of affected parties is small, but the impact on those parties could be high…and very unsettling. But my real beef is with this nonchalant and non-specific notification email. Hopefully, Google follows up with more comms, google photos videos strangers
