The internet behemoth Google is once again facing displeasure from internet users who backup their Photos and videos saved on their mobile phone on Google server. In a frightening incident, the company is found to be sharing private videos of those people with strangers.
When you choose Google backup services to save a copy of videos or photos, you get an option to choose Google Takeout to retrieve those backed up files anytime anywhere. And that’s when things went haywire for people, and Google as well.
Many people have reported that they found a lot of private videos of unknown people downloaded on your devices while they retrieved their own videos from Google backup.
Realising the seriousness for the situation, Alphabet has quickly released a warning to some users notifying them that private videos might have been downloaded by unknown people.
“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,” a Google spokesperson said.
Google has claimed that a bug has been fixed. The company has also claimed to have conducted in-depth research about the incident to learn more about How and Why such breach took place. The company has assured users that such incidents would not be taking place in future.
But at the same time, Google has tried to play down the matter. The company has claimed that less than 0.01% of people who exported their videos from Google Photo during the aforementioned period are affected.
Such incidents once again trigger a debate on the technologies we are being offered or getting surrounded with. As Google tried to provide more security to users to download their backup files, it launched Google Takeout. The service allows users to have more control over files they backup or retrieve.
Google has sent the apology letter to all those affected users, but users believe that damages are done. Here it is the content of the letter.
Many users are quite concerned about their private videos that may have already been downloaded by unknown people. The content of those videos may be quite personal and could be misused in various ways.
It would be interesting to see if the issue is permanently settled or we see some frustrating or annoyed user suing Google for mishandling his personal videos, soon!
