Google admits it may have shared your private videos with strangers
Google has been forced to alert some of its users that their private videos were inadvertently sent to strangers.
In an email to Google Photos users, the tech giant said it had suffered a “technical issue” in Google Takeout — the function that allows people to download their data.
“Unfortunately, during this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users’ archives,” the firm said.
Google has not provided any details about how many people were affected, nor the number of videos that were wrongly sent to other accounts.
It is understood that the issue was resolved after five days, and less than 0.01 per cent of users attempting to download their data were affected.
“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 in a statement.
“These users may have received either an incomplete archive, or videos — not photos — that were not theirs. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again. We are very sorry this happened.”
It follows reports that Google Photos is trialling a subscription service that will send users physical copies of their best photos.
The programme, which will cost $8 (£6.20) per month, will automatically select 10 prints from the previous 30 days of photos.