Over the weekend users of Google Docs application service were told that a bug in the system had exposed their private documents to unauthorised recipients.
As mistakes go, this was not a particularly big one. It meant that 0.05 per cent of documents held by Google on its servers "in the cloud" were shared inadvertently.
The problem was quickly fixed. "We've identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently," a Google Docs manager wrote in in a blog post.
"We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously."
The problem occurred in cases where people had chosen to collaborate on multiple documents and adjusted settings to allow access to others, according to Google. Collaborators were given permission to access documents aside from the ones intended.
Although no one seems to have come to great harm from this, the bigger problem is that the cloud and the applications that live in it are meant to be the future. The move to the cloud - as opposed to using software that you install and keep on your own computer - is one of the biggest stories of the last couple of years and is changing the way individuals and companies relate to the internet.
We are meant to be happy to trust Google or Microsoft or any of dozens of companies now offering to host our applications and content online to look after them and make sure we can access them and control them.
But as this incident and the Gmail outage showed last month, when things go wrong in the cloud, users simply have to sit on their hands and wait for it to be fixed. And that is before we get into the trickier subject of privacy in the cloud.
I know some individuals who have sworn never to place their trust in the cloud and many company chief technology officers are reluctant to place their corporate lives in someone else's hands. Would you?
Source: Tech Central
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