According to this Slashdot story, the bug came to light in late February, when Apps users in a small Dutch company realized that about 15 documents were being shared with several people, many outside their own domain–without being authorized. After some research, the company found what triggered the problem:
We found out that one of us had been wanting to share these documents with a colleague (within our domain). He selected the documents on the documents list and added one user. Google Docs then shared all these documents with everyone who had access to one of the selected documents.
Not a good situation. The company posted the issue on Google’s support forum on Feb. 22, and Google resolved the bug on March 5. Google then sent an e-mail to all affected Docs users explaining the problem and informing them that Google had removed sharing from all affected documents. Google explained the problem this way:
We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. 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.
In the Google Docs blog detailing the issue, product manager Jennifer Mazzon assured users that the bug “affected less than 0.05%” of all documents. She apologized “for the trouble this has caused,” noting:
We understand our users’ concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we’re treating this very seriously. We hope this explanation provides greater clarity.
It’s too bad. One of the main hits against cloud computing suites like Google Apps is that they could leave company data wide open if the cloud computing vendor messes up–and that’s just what Google did. Still, Google fixed the bug, and as of this writing, the problem seems to be fairly well contained. What do you think? Should a bug like this lead users to second-guess cloud computing? Post a comment and let us know.
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