5.2.3 Google other services failure

Google documents is a storage place where Internet users can store several kind of documents in order to access them from everywhere.

On March the 9th 2009 it is the Google Documents application which faced some troubles. (Claburn, T. (2009). Google Informs Docs Users Of Security Lapse.)

It appears that a bug allowed some Internet users to have access to some other Internet users documents without their agreement. As well explained by Google hierarchy: "The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place."(Mazzon, J. (2009). On yesterday’s email.) it finally occurred to 0,05% of the documents hosted.

Even if the number of documents concerned by this failure has not been very high it clearly shows that such issues can happen.

It is then important to inform individuals and companies to such a risk. Companies should then not store confidential documents in those applications. Using commercial search engines applications for business seem risky.