Google Photos shares many private videos of some users with strangers

Google recently sent a notice to a number of Google Photos users, saying that some videos hosted on the service were likely exported to the archives of random, unknown users.

“Unfortunately, during this time, some Google Photos videos were exported to unrelated users’ archives. One or more videos in your Google Photos account were affected by the problem. this “

People who have used Google’s “Download your data” service for Google Photos between November 21 and November 25 may find their exported data file incomplete, and may contains videos of other users. Google is currently notifying affected users, and it is unclear how many people have become victims of the aforementioned negligence.

The message you see above was captured by Twitter user Jon Oberheide, co-founder of Duo Security, on February 3. At the time, it was unclear how many users were affected.

Google said that over a 5-day period (November 21-25), a technical problem occurred that caused the user’s video to be exported to unrelated people. However, the company reassured users that the problem was fixed, and that people should delete the files that were previously exported and perform a new export operation as soon as possible.

It is possible that one user’s videos have been shared with an unknown number of other users, and neither the company nor the users can be sure which videos are among those shared. Google only mentions “video”, so it is possible to guess that the image output file is more likely not to be affected.

Recently, Google has been involved in quite a lot of security scandals. At the end of 2019, a German security research organization put eight “smart spies” into both the Alexa and Google Home app stores to prove that eavesdropping and phishing can be easy. Easily done through the smart speaker type.

And yet, it was recently discovered that Avast, a popular antivirus tool for both PCs and Macs, is collecting user data and selling them directly to Google and Microsoft.

Reference: AppleInsider