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Google Docs Bug Raises Security Concerns

Techtree News Staff, Mar 11, 2009 0932 hrs IST

Private documents being shared with unauthorized users

It seems Google is still finding it difficult to stay away from controversy. If it was the Gmail outage and the Search results bug last month, it is the turn of Google Docs in March.

Apparently, the company's famous online word processing service, Google Docs was hit by a security bug that caused private documents being shared with unauthorized users. This was caused by a flaw in the system, which caused the documents to be made accessible to users who were not supposed to see it. The flaw has now been fixed, according to Google.

In a blog post detailing the issue, a company spokesperson said We ve identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently. The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document.

The good thing about the flaw was that it did not affect other products of Google Docs; spreadsheets, for example, were unaffected by the issue. The bug affected only 0.05 percent of Google Doc users and required users to perform a certain set of actions to activate the bug.