All Google services are aimed, in addition to ensuring user comfort, also to provide the search giant with profit. The company collects information about you and me, and then either uses it to target and improve the relevance of advertisements, or provides the obtained data to its partners. I agree that this is not the most pleasant fate that can await confidential information, but in fairness, we must admit that Google cannot afford to merge user data on the side without first depersonalizing it and removing all connections with the owner. Well, at least on purpose.
Google reliably stores user data, but sometimes uncontrolled leaks occur that last for several days
Google accidentally sent someone else's videos from the 'Google Photos' service to some users following a request made through the 'Google Archiver'. The incident took place in November, but the company has deigned to admit this only now, sending the affected users e-mails with notification. The reports said that their personal videos were sent to strangers due to an error in the data archiving system.
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Google accidentally sent other people's videos from Google Photos to users
For those who do not understand what this is about, we explain. Google has a 'Google Archiver' service that allows anyone to request from the company the full range of information collected by its applications. It can be anything from phone numbers from your address book and scheduled calendar events to directions in Google Maps and the history of watched videos on YouTube. Among other things, 'Google Archiver' allows you to request at once all the photos and videos stored in 'Google Photos', which are archived and sent to their owner by mail. Only in November there was some kind of failure and the archives with video recordings were sent to the wrong address for four days.
'We are in a hurry to notify users who requested an archive with content from' Google Photos' via the 'Archiver' service between November 21 and 25, about the error. These users could have received either an incomplete archive with missing data, or an archive with videos – not photographs – that do not belong to them. We have fixed the underlying problem that led to this and took the necessary steps to ensure that this situation does not recur in the future. We are very sorry that such a case took place, '' says Google's appeal.
Leaked from Google Photos
By and large, the scale of the tragedy is not that great. Less than 0.01% of Google Photos users were affected by the crash, Google claims, and the photos are guaranteed to remain intact. Another thing is that it basically happened and private videos fell into the wrong hands. Yes, it was impossible to understand who exactly they belonged to, however, if their author had not previously bothered to delete the metadata, it was possible to find out the location, date and time from them, which is already a lot, not to mention that a random person, in principle got access to private videos.
Personally, in such situations, I am always drawn to smithereens to smash the company guilty of a data leak. Here I am of the opinion that a holy place is never empty, and if one leak occurs, another will certainly happen. Despite the fact that Google has promised that nothing like this will happen again, I would not count on it. Maybe Google Photos videos won't really leak anymore, but where is the guarantee that something else, but no less valuable and confidential, will not leak?