Google sent users' private videos in Google Photos to strangers

Google has now sent notifications to users of its Google Photos services after their recent privacy fiasco where the internet Search Giant sent users private videos to strangers accounts.

Google Photos Private Videos Privacy — Google sends users’ private videos in Google Photos to strangers.

The cause of this incident was a technical issue in Google’s Takeout Service that lets people download their data. This occurred last month between 21 November and 25 November.

The notification email sent by Google doesn’t mention the amount of users that were affected directly by this incident where videos of users were sent to other people’s accounts.

According to a 9to5Google report, less than 0.01 percent of people who used to Takeout function were affected and taking into account that Google Photos has over 1 billion users, even a small percentage like 0.01 impacts a large group of people and raises cause for concern over these types of cloud services.

This was the notification issued by the company to the users of the service.

Google clearly states:

We are writing to inform you of a technical issue that affected the Google Download your data service for Google Photos between November 21, 2019 and November 25, 2019, when it was fixed,

The notification continued further down saying:

Unfortunately, during this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users’ archives. One or more videos in your Google Photos account was affected by this issue.

Google however apologized for the incident saying “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Google also told 9to5Google in a statement saying:

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.

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