Google has just given us a big shock by admitting a big privacy bug in Google Photos. Google has alerted some users that some of their private videos on Google Photos were accidentally sent to strangers due to a technical issue. Google has apologized for this
This issue affected Google photos between November 21st and November 25th last year. So a small number of users who downloaded archives of their videos from takeout also received some of the videos that didn’t belong to them.
Google is now sending emails to all affected users but has not admitted how many people were actually affected. It also didn’t confirm how many videos were distributed incorrectly. Google gave a statement to 9to5Google where it said less than 0.01% of people downloaded their data during the technical issue were affected.
Google Photos has over 1 billion users, so even a small percentage will be significant. The data has already reached to people who downloaded it, there is nothing Google can do to fix this. It is also surprising to see how much time Google took to admit this.
This issue isn’t small. We keep our personal photos and videos on Google Photos. Some of the videos could be really private and sensitive. Now when most of the Android users also use Google photos auto backup, this kind of technical issue isn’t acceptable.
