Infosecurity

Google fixes online document sharing bug

By Jianggan Li | 10 March 2009

Some users of Google Docs, a free web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application, discovered over the weekend that their collaborators for some shared documents had disappeared.

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The incident is expected to renew concerns previously raised on the privacy and security aspects of sharing documents ‘in the cloud’.

Jennifer Mazzon, Google Docs Product Manager later explained in Google’s official blog, that this was due to the fix that they applied to a bug, which happened on Friday night.

The bug allowed some documents to be shared inadvertently. However, Mazzon claimed that only ‘a very small percentage of users’ were affected, and ‘only when a specific sequence of user actions took place’.

Saved on Google’s servers, Google Docs documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time.

She said that the bug occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions. Spreadsheets were not affected, assured Mazzon.

As part of the fix, an automated process was implemented to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected. Mazzon said Google had sent notifications the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them.

This incident is expected to renew the concerns previously raised on the privacy and security aspects of sharing documents in the cloud.