Arcadia Posted February 7, 2020 Posted February 7, 2020 From Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/04/google-photos-makes-big-screw-up-and-mayve-leaked-your-videos-to-a-random-stranger/#464d04bf5486 “Google has admitted to a gaffe in which it sent user videos to strangers. Google has been writing to affected users this week, saying they’ve been hit by a technical issue on its “download your data” tool for its photos service. Anyone who asked to download their data between November 21 - 25, 2019 could’ve seen their Google Photos files sent off to someone else, the tech company warned. They may well have received other people’s photos too. Though the problem has now been fixed, Google apologized for the “inconvenience.” But some users are understandably irked. Jon Oberheide, who co-founded Duo Security (acquired by Cisco for $2 billion), described the faux pas as a “big screw up.” “I hope the number of affected parties is small, but the impact to 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,” Oberheide wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. He wrote to Google, asking for more information on what exact photos and videos were leaked, and to how many people, but was told: "Unfortunately, we're not able to provide a full list of impacted videos." A Google spokesperson added: “We are notifying people about a bug that may have affected users who used Google Takeout to export their Google Photos content between November 21 and November 25. These users may have received either an incomplete archive, or videos—not photos—that were not theirs. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again. We are very sorry this happened.” Given it’s been over two months since the incident, you’d hope Google had cleaned up this potentially-calamitous leak of people’s private videos” 1 Quote
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