Google has reached out to some of its Google Photos users to inform them of a bug that has resulted in personal videos being emailed to strangers. The flaw affected users of Google’s Takeout service, which allows you to export your data from apps like Gmail and YouTube to a downloadable archive file.
The technical issues affected users between November 21 and November 25.
As a result of this security flaw, downloaded archives might not have been completed while private videos might have been sent to emails of strangers.
A spokesperson for Google, told 9to5 Google, “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.”
Google also emphasised that only a small number of users were affected by the bug. However, the search giant didn’t give any figures as to how many people were affected. The email sent also didn’t disclose the number of individual videos incorrectly distributed from the account. 9to5 Google reported that the flaw was fixed after five days and less than 0.01 percent of Google Photos users who use Takeout was affected. While that does seem like a small number, Google Photos’ has over 1 billion users, so even the bug impacted such a small percentage, the number of people affected would still be significant.
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