Google has recently admitted a serious bug in Google Takeout. Due to this bug, videos reached the wrong archives.
Google Takeout Bug Exposed User Videos
Google are informing users about a bug in the Google Takeout service. As revealed, Google found a technical issue with the ‘Download your data’ service for Google Photos. Due to the glitch that existed between November 21, 2019, and November 25, 2019, a potential privacy breach occurred. Specifically, the glitch caused some users’ uploaded videos to reach other users’ archives.
As stated in their notice,
Unfortunately, during this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users’ archives. One or more videos in your Google Photos account was affected by this issue.
Consequently, the users who downloaded their data during this period may have either downloaded incomplete videos. Or, they may have downloaded videos that wouldn’t belong to them.
Google Fixed The Bug
In their notice, Google assured they have fixed the bug in Google Takeout. However, for the users who had downloaded data during the time of the bug, Google asks them to perform the action again. Google also requests the users to delete the data exported earlier.
Here is the complete notification sent to the users as shared on Twitter.
While the Google Takeout bug has been apparently resolved, it still is a matter of concern that the users’ videos got exposed. And now, it is entirely at the discretion of the users to delete any videos that do not belong to them.
What’s more troublesome is that Google hasn’t disclosed any specific details about the incident or the number of affected users. When asked about the details, Google’s response stated,
In cases where we know that another person has downloaded at least one of a user’s videos, we have said so. Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide a full list of impacted videos.
Nonetheless, they assured rectification of the technical issue.
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